New owners want to grow PPG’s glass business
During the weekend that Vitro S.A.B. de C.V. closed on its purchase of PPG’s flat glass business, a human resources official from the Mexican glass maker made the rounds at the Pittsburgh coatings company’s glass research center in Harmar, placing a shiny gray coffee mug with a Vitro logo at each workstation.
Though most employees weren’t in the building at the time, a few who were overheard him announce each worker’s name aloud as he approached their unoccupied desks and say, “Welcome to Vitro.”
When they showed up to work a few days later, employees at all the PPG flat glass locations watched a video in which Vitro workers greeted them with balloons, signs and applause.
Dick Beuke, a longtime PPG executive who is now vice president of Vitro’s U.S. and Canada operations, said those were powerful gestures to a workforce that in recent years had been unsure about its long-term fate.
PPG got its start in the 1880s as Pittsburgh Plate Glass. But for the last couple of decades, it has been transforming from glass and chemicals into one of the largest paints producers in the world through a series of coatings acquisitions and the sale of many old-line manufacturing segments including glass used in car windshields.
“Our business was important to PPG, but not strategic,” Mr. Beuke said of flat glass, which along with a fiberglass unit generated only about $1 billion of the company’s $15 billion in annual revenues last year.
PPG sold the flat glass business to Vitro on Oct. 1 for $750 million and on the same day closed the sale of its European fiberglass business to Nippon Electric Glass of Japan for an undisclosed amount.
The Pittsburgh company expects to sell its 50 percent ownership in two Asian fiberglass ventures by the end of the year. In April, it sold its 40 percent stake in Pittsburgh Glass Works to LKQ Corp., a Chicagobased auto parts maker.
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