Kaman Corp. continues acquisition surge with purchase of Zeller Corp.
In one of the larger acquisitions of an automation distributor in recent years, Kaman Corp., Bloomfield, Conn., announced its plans to acquire Zeller Corp., Rochester, N.Y., an automation specialist with 240 people (including 60 degreed engineers) and expected 2012 sales of approximately $80 million.
Zeller is a premier Schneider Electric distributor and also sells products from Kollmorgen, Phoenix Contact, Rittal and Sick. The company has operations in in Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo, New York; Foxboro, Massachusetts; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Kaman has recently acquired three otherdistributors in the electrical automation space -- Minarik Co., Glendale, Calif.; Target Electronic Supply, Westwood, Mass,; and Automation Technology, Salt Lake City, Utah. Gary Haseley, president, Zell Corp., will be staying with the company after the acquisition in completed. Look for more details on this acqusition in the Aug. 24 issue of Electrical Marketing newsletter.
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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.