Waukegan-based Coleman Cable Inc. said Thursday that it paid $35 million to acquire Watteredge Inc., an electrical products company based in Avon Lake, Ohio, near Cleveland.
The acquisition will give Coleman, which manufactures electrical wire and cable products for a variety of industries, a line of secondary power connectors for customers in heavy industries including steel, chemicals, power generation and autos.
Coleman stock, which trades on the Nasdaq, fell 1.6 percent to $8.60 a share before the announcement, which came after the closing bell, and slipped slightly in after-hours trading, according to Yahoo Finance.
“This acquisition immediately expands our product platform and allows us to provide an entirely new line of highly engineered industrial products across a number of end markets,” Gary Yetman, Coleman’s president and chief executive, said in a release.
Yetman said he looks forward to working with Watteredge management and the statement said Coleman plans to keep the Ohio company’s workforce and maintain its manufacturing plant in Avon Lake.
Coleman, which has made a number of strategic acquisitions over the past decade, earned $17.4 million on sales of $867 million last year. Sales grew 7.1 percent to $220 million in the first quarter compared to the same period a year earlier, but earnings slipped 28 percent to $3.7 million.
Watteredge had sales of nearly $25 million last year and adjusted cash flow of $6 million.
