Cimco’s New Owner Sells Off Core Business to Arizona Firm

The Cleveland company that bought Cimco Inc. early this year has agreed to sell the local company’s core plastics molding business to an Arizona company for an undisclosed price.

More than 350 employees at Cimco’s three molding plants in Costa Mesa will remain in place for now, but a restructuring is likely, said Nicholas Smeed, an executive at InteSys Technologies Inc. in Gilbert, Ariz. It expects to complete acquisition of the operation late this month.

“We want to keep as many employees as we can until we figure out how we can operate most efficiently,” Smeed said. InteSys may transfer some of them to its plant in Gilbert, an eastern suburb of Phoenix, he said.

InteSys, a privately held company, is buying the molding business from M.A. Hanna Co., an international specialty chemicals company that bought Cimco in January.

At the time of its purchase, Hanna said it only wanted Cimco’s fast-growing Compounding Technology Inc. subsidiary, which makes plastic fillers with added qualities like strength and fire resistance.

The Cleveland company agreed at the time to enter negotiations to sell the molding business--the core operation--back to Cimco founder Russell T. Gilbert. He said then he wanted to rebuild Cimco and sell it to the employees in about five years. Gilbert, who founded Cimco 36 years ago, was going to put $6 million into the deal, which would have given him a 51% stake. Employees and investors would have owned the rest.

But Hanna and Gilbert couldn’t come to terms, and Hanna sought other bids.