Over the past four years K-Tron has also expand- ed into more-muscular equipment that crushes coal.
Rowe Price Small-Cap Value Fund has owned K-Tron stock since the company went public in 1980.
Beebe, K-Tron's chairman at the time, who had spent 28 years as Henry Ford II's adviser.
From 2004 to 2006 K-Tron drew between 34% and 43% of its revenue from abroad.
In back you'll find the machine assembly plant and a wing leased to one of K-Tron's vendors.
Twelve miles south of Philadelphia, on the outskirts of Pitman, New Jersey (pop. 9, 331), K-Tron International is making breakfast.
He says that both K-Tron and Hillenbrand are manufacturing companies with similar processes.
"That deal almost sunk K-Tron, " says Cloues, who was a board member at the time and received a distress signal.
K-Tron began life in 1949 as a maker of pneumatic scales, moving a couple of decades later into digitally controlled feeders.
Could Cloues help sell Colortronic to Marcel Rohr who, as a former K-Tron executive, had originally engineered the purchase of the company?
Cloues, who became chief executive in 1998, spent a good part of his early tenure reorganizing K-Tron, outsourcing expensive processes like metal bending and getting rid of assets--selectively.
And as for K-Tron, whose annual sales have chugged along at 17% over the last five years, "We'd like to continue doing exactly what we're doing, " says Cloues.
Hillenbrand, a casket manufacturing business, acquired K-Tron, a pneumatic equipment company, in anticipation that the death-related services industry will not see much growth in the next few years.
So accurate are K-Tron's scales that sales reps like to step onto them, hand clients a business card and watch their faces while the difference in weight is registered.
"We certainly can take advantage of currency strength in one location versus another, " says Chief Financial Officer Ronald Remick, who came over to K-Tron in 1999 from what was then known as Arco Chemical.
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