Glass deal: S. Jersey's Wheaton glued to German firm

Duran Group, a Wertheim, Germany-based glassmaker with 600 workers at three plants in central Europe, has purchased 350-employee Wheaton, the century-old Millville laboratory glass and plastic container supplier, for an undisclosed price. Besides its flagship Millville plant, Wheaton also operates a smaller plant near Manchester, England.

Seller was Incline Partners, a Pittsburgh investment firm (formerly part of PNC when Dave Hillman ran their private investments) that had owned the business since 2010. Duran is owned by $11 billion-asset One Equity Capital Partners, a New York buyout firm run by a group of former JPMorgan investment bankers.

Duran's backing "will allow us to accelerate a number of growth programs already in progress" and "opens up many possibilities for improvements and growth," said Wayne Brinster, a former Becton Dickinson Corp. executive who has served as Wheaton's president and chief executive since 2012. With its skilled labor and sand supply, South Jersey is a historic center for industrial glassmakers, though employment has dropped.

As recently as the 1990s, the Wheaton complex in Millville was best known for making whiskey bottles for Jack Daniels and Seagrams and other mass-market companies. Piles of clear, brown and green bottles for recycling towered outside the complex. Owner Will Wheaton and dozens of his relatives, heirs of the founding family, sold the company in 1996 to a Swiss aluminum maker who re-sold it to Canadian alumnimum maker Alcan. (The alcohol bottle business was split off, declined and was shut in August by owner Gerresheimer (Kimble Glass), idling 100.)

Wheaton's former science-products group, reinforced with the purchase of a string of specialty producers, was separated and resold to private equity investors in 2006, leading to the Incline deal.

"We put the customer in the center of our strategy," Brinster told me, noting the company uses Amazon.com's rapid delivery and other consumer industry standards as goals for its own sales to businesses.  

He said Duran produces some of the glass materials Wheaton uses in its products, while Wheaton provides specialized processing that will benefit Duran products. "It's vertical integration, but it's not redundant, so it will not come with reductions in force," Brinster added. "The growth rate will accelerate and we'll get more work through our factories."