Thoughts on the Paulo Heat Treat Sale

The Announcement that North American commercial heat treater Paulo had been acquired by Aalberts N.V.just last week caught many in the North American commercial heat treat industry off guard. This prompted the team at “The Monty” to reflect on the history of the two companies and how this acquistion might effect the North American commercial heat treat industry;
  • Paulo for as long as we can remember has been the largest family owned commercial heat treater in North America-how they compare in size to other commercial heat treaters can be found at https://themonty.com/project/the-montys-50-largest-north-american-commercial-heat-treaters-2024/
  • This acquisition will change our 2025 rankings of commercial heat treaters with another family owned operation “Solar Atmospheres” moving into the third position.
  • Aalberts Surface Technologies with this acquisition now ranks very closely in size to our perennial market leader “Bodycote”-it will be interesting to look at how the two compare in size. 
  • It’s interesting that Aalberts (based in the Netherlands) was a very small player in North America just 15 years ago. Their growth particularly in the past 10 years has been very impressive.
  • It is the understanding of “The Monty” that no changes will be occurring at Paulo in the near future and that present management will stay on for a certain period of time. 
  • To date Aalberts and Paulo have generally not competed “head to head” which makes this a very good fit.
  • This acquisition solidifies the fact that the commercial heat-treating market in North American has been consolidating over the years and it appears it is picking up speed. December 17th we mentioned an acquisition-Thermal-Vac, others that come to mind include this one on December 16th, another one-this time in Canada on December 3rd and East Lind Heat Treat in May of this year. This is kind of a fun game, we will have to put together a list of all the North American heat treaters that were sold this year. 
We regret that we have few photos of the Paulo plants but we do have these four taken over the years at the Cleveland, Mexico and Murfreesboro, TN., locations.
 
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