Alyn Buoyed by Deals With GE, Black & Decker

Alyn Corp., an advanced composites producer with few sales and mounting losses since it was founded in 1989, has signed a series of deals in recent months that will add millions to its annual revenue and turn it into a full-fledged manufacturer of automotive and sporting goods components.

The new business could add as many as 15 new manufacturing workers to the company’s payroll, bringing employment by year’s end to 85. To handle the new work, Alyn has leased an 84,000-square-foot building near its 48,000-square-foot Irvine headquarters, nearly tripling its total space.

Its most recent contract, a deal announced Thursday to build a key part of the frame for General Motors Corp.’s EV-1 electric car, is a key one for the company because it gives Alyn entry into the automotive market.

“The real value of a contract like this is that these relationships never stop at just one point,” said Richard L. Little, Alyn’s chief financial officer.

Earlier this summer, Alyn signed agreements to sell $25 million or more of extruded tubing made from its patented metallic composite, Boralyn, to True Temper Sports, a unit of Black & Decker Corp. The tubing will be used for golf club shafts and bicycle frames.

Neither GM nor Alyn would disclose the value or term of the multiyear EV-1 contract, but it is expected to be worth several million dollars to the company. GM introduced the EV-1 in December and so far has leased 275 of the cars. A spokesman for the company’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Division, which signed the purchase agreement with Alyn, said GM has plans to expand the electric vehicle market.

All of that is good news to an 8-year-old company that has never had an annual profit or a year with more than $450,000 in sales. Alyn reported $200,000 in sales and a $2.4-million loss for the first half of this year. Little said sales for all of 1997 “will be nominal,” with revenue from the new contracts not showing up until the second half of next year.

Despite its lackluster sales and earnings history, the company has caught the eye of several Wall Street analysts since it went public 13 months ago. After launching at $13.50 a share, Alyn stock rose briefly to a high of $15.25 before sliding to a low of $7.63 in August.

But company officials have just completed a trip to the East Coast to take their message to the investment community, and those meetings, combined with recent “buy” recommendations from analysts at Needham & Co. and Furman Selz, have boosted the stock back into the mid-teens.

The shares closed Thursday at $14.06, down $1.18 for the day on the Nasdaq market.

To handle the GM work, Alyn is installing a huge high-pressure casting machine that injects a molten form of its proprietary Boralyn composite into a complex mold.

The Boralyn--a mixture of boron carbide, aluminum, titanium and nickel--hardens instantly after being squirted into the mold under 900 pounds of pressure and forms the so-called cradle section of the EV-1 frame, which supports the car’s front suspension and electric motor.

The company also is adding a 4,000-ton extrusion machine that squeezes out continuous lengths of Boralyn tubing.