CGT celebrates 150 years in Cambridge
The company has seen $200 million in investment since 2012 acquisition
CAMBRIDGE — In the six years since Holcan Investments purchased Canadian General-Tower Ltd. (CGT), the new owners have invested about $200 million into the company.
An expansion is nearing completion at a manufacturing facility in China, home as well to CGT’s new Global Innovation Centre. A new plant opened in Texas in 2017 and is expected to employ about 250 people by this time next year. And millions of dollars have been invested into new technology at the company’s home base in Cambridge.
But if you ask Craig Richardson what CGT’s most valuable asset is, the chief executive officer is quick to answer — it’s the people.
“I think that’s what ultimately separates you from the competition.”
Tracing its roots back 150 years to a Galt business that made wagon wheels and axe handles, CGT now employs more than 1,200 people at manufacturing, innovation and sales sites around the world. About 500 work in Cambridge.
Its focus has shifted over the years. “I can still call it transportation, though,” Richardson said.
About 80 per cent of sales are in coated fabrics and films for automotive interior surfaces including seating and door and instrument panels. Vinyl swimming pool liners and construction materials like roofing and containment membranes round out the product line.
For most of its history, CGT was owned by five generations of the Chaplin family, which steered the Middleton Street business through war and peace, boom and recession.
Understandably, news that the family was selling the company in 2012 was met with uncertainty.
“When you have a family that has owned an entity for so long, and is so committed to not just the employees but the community itself, I think there is fear and concern about transition,” Richardson acknowledged.
New to CGT in 2013 after 15 years at the helm of Grand River Foods, Richardson was tasked with earning that trust and convincing staff that the new owner — a family-owned firm based in Burlington — was in it for the long term.
“This was not an international player who was simply looking to buy market share so that they could close this operation and consolidate it with their plant in who knows where.”
Richardson said significant investments have helped to assuage those worries, as has a focus on employee engagement.
“I don’t think culture is a thing you are. I think it’s a thing you do,” he said. “We wanted to ensure that engagement was a big priority, that people felt a part of something successful, and that they had a role to play in that success.”
Many longtime employees have retired in recent years, replaced by new faces gained in a hiring spree in 2015 and 2016, said Marc Campanelli, vice-president, operations.
Still, nearly 60 per cent of the Cambridge workforce has been there more than a decade, he noted; his time there began in 1997.
CGT has a number of initiatives planned to mark its sesquicentennial. In partnership with the city of Cambridge, the company is rejuvenating the baseball diamonds at adjacent Waterworks Park. There are also plans to clean up a nearby woodlot along the banks of the Grand River, adding walking trails and opening it to the public.
“It’s a way for our business to give back and support a community like Cambridge, which has been very good to CGT over the years,” Richardson said.
Changing times, technologies and consumer demand have seen the company evolve from its origins in Galt’s Victoria Wheel Works through the production of rubber-based consumer goods like shower curtains, raincoats and diapers.
Today, CGT counts many of the world’s top automakers as customers for its interior surface materials. Its leatherlike finishes offer excellent comfort and durability at a fraction of the price — “an affordable luxury,” Richardson said.
“I have to credit the ingenuity of the engineers and the chemists … that have been part of CGT for the past several decades for bringing us to the point that we are today.”
Richardson said he’s encouraging sales teams to look beyond the automotive sector to public transportation providers that could outfit planes, buses and trains with CGT products.
The emergence of ridesharing programs and autonomous vehicles means that interiors will also have to stand up to more wear and tear than ever before.
At the same time, Richardson said he’d like to reduce CGT’s dependency on the automotive sector from 80 per cent of sales to 65 per cent.
New competitors in the interior surfaces market mean there’s about 40 per cent more global production capacity than market demand, he said. “Our greatest interest is in consolidating the industry and acquiring a competitor.”
While Cambridge is the only manufacturing site currently producing nonautomotive goods, Texas and China could take on those products as well.
Richardson expects the new innovation centre in China will play a key role in shaping CGT’s future.
“The team is focused on improving what we make today, they’re focused on developing new applications for our products, and looking at what else we can do with our know-how,” he said.
“What can we do with that and leverage it into something more meaningful for the marketplace?”