Corning acquires Champion Products

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Champion Products Inc., a Strafford-based manufacturer of enclosures, power pedestals and shelters for telecommunications customers such as Sprint and Lucent Technologies, was Oct. 10 sold to North Carolina-based Corning Cable Systems, a leading manufacturer of fiber optic and copper communication network infrastructure solutions. |ret||ret||tab|

Officials at Champion and Corning declined to disclose the selling price of the operation. |ret||ret||tab|

"(Corning) supplies the fiber optics for what's called the backbone,' that runs between major cities," said Champion Products President Carl Tiedt. "What attracted them to us is the products we have are complementary to theirs; we have outside plant products, which are cabinets or pedestals used for splicing fiber and for making connections within buildings." |ret||ret||tab|

Tiedt said Champion's desire to provide better service to its customers, most of whom have a worldwide presence, drove the company's owners to sell to Corning.|ret||ret||tab|

"A lot of our customers wanted us to have a worldwide presence to help them service and sell products in South America, Europe, Australia and so forth, and being a privately held company, we weren't in a position to provide that," Tiedt said. |ret||ret||tab|

Tiedt, who began Champion Products in 1987 with Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Moore, Harry Moore, Dennis Moore and Jim Sutliff, said Corning will retain Champion's management team and its 300 employees at five locations in southwest Missouri and Pensacola, Fla. He said the operation will continue to manufacture the same products for the time being, but that will probably change with technology. |ret||ret||tab|

A news release from Corning said future plans include moving the products manufactured at the Pensacola facility to a plant in Reynosa, Mexico, according to a Corning news release. The Strafford location houses about half of the company's employees, Tiedt said. Jim Moore said Corning indicated that it intends to expand the Strafford location and increase production there. |ret||ret||tab|

Champion began with the acquisition of a small product line of a St. Louis company, Moore said.|ret||ret||tab|

"We started it from ground zero ... we sold telephone pedestals to AT&T, Ameritech and Bell South, then we grew sales internally and made more acquisitions through the years. We made five or six acquisitions of small product lines and moved them here, and that gave us our real backbone," Moore said. |ret||ret||tab|

He said Champion acquired its neighbor, A-One Manufacturing in 1993 and Pressroom Equipment in Springfield in 1996. Champion in 1996 also acquired a Pensacola, Fla. company called Mo-Ped that manufactured plastic telephone pedestals used on the coasts, which Moore said rounded out Champion's product line. |ret||ret||tab|

Corning Cable is a subsidiary of New York-based Corning Inc. |ret||ret||tab|

It employs 14,000 worldwide and has gross sales of more than $2 billion. As a result of the Champion acquisition, Corning Cable Systems will continue to broaden its outside plant hardware product line used in telecommunications and cable television networks, according to the release. |ret||ret||tab|

"By acquiring Champion, Corning Cable Systems has filled an important gap in its tip-to-tip' access strategy," said Marty Curran, Corning Cable Systems senior vice president of hardware and equipment operations, in the release. |ret||ret||tab|

"As demand for bandwidth explodes, new technologies, such as Digital Subscriber Line and Fiber-to-the-Curb are being deployed, driving fiber networks and electronics closer to home."[[In-content Ad]]