Generac Expands Portfolio with Acquisition of Country Home Products
Generator and light tower manufacturer Generac has acquired Country Home Products and its subsidiaries. Country Home Products, founded in 1985 and headquartered in Vergennes, Vt., is a manufacturer of engine-powered equipment including field and brush mowers, chippers and shredders, trimmers, leaf vacuums, stump grinders, log splitters and battery-powered lawnmowers.
Country Home products are primarily sold in North America under the DR and Neuton brand names.
“Acquiring Country Home Products is a great strategic fit for Generac’s business and is perfectly aligned with our Powering Ahead strategic objective of diversifying our end markets with new products and services,” said Generac president and CEO Aaron Jagdfeld. “This acquisition dramatically expands our chore-related products line-up and will provide additional scale to our residential engine-powered tools platform. We believe this transaction should create meaningful cross-selling opportunities with our existing distribution and should also generate certain cost synergies as we leverage our existing global sourcing and manufacturing capabilities.”
Joe Perrotto, president of Country Home Products, was optimistic about the future for CHP as part of Generac. “It will open up even larger markets for sales of DR, Neuton and Generac products both in the U.S. and globally, and will also create meaningful opportunities to improve our product costs and ultimately the value we bring to our customers,” he said.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Country Home Products’ management team will continue to lead the business going forward, the company said. Generac said it will provide additional comments when its second quarter 2015 financial results are released later this week.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.