UPDATE... Mad Money's Jim Cramer weighs in on Eaton purchase of Cooper Industries
Eaton Corp., Cleveland, announced its plans to buy Cooper Industries, Houston, in a deal that's sure to send shockwaves throught the electrical market and bring Eaton into many new markets, including lighting, hazardous equipment, utility products, fuses, wiring devices and strut. The combined company would have had historical 2011 revenues of $21.5 billion, according to an Eaton press release. Cooper's stock price surged 25% on news of the acquisition.
While the conference call announcing the acquisitions focused for the most part on the financial aspects of the deal, Sandy Cutler, Eaton's CEO, did touch on the addition of utility products to Eaton's product mix, and seemed particularly excited about the potential of growth within this product area. Details
Presentation on acquisition from Eaton Corp. 5/21 conference call
More to come later today...
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.