Miba Expanding McConnelsville Engine Bearing Plant

Miba Bearings US LLC (a division of Miba AG, Austria) is expanding its heavywall engine bearing factory in McConnelsville, Ohio, USA. Key to the expansion is involvement by the Morgan County Community Improvement Corporation, a state-funded institution which applied for and received a $2 million, 2%, 10-year loan on behalf of Miba. The CIC is using those funds to purchase the entire 292,000 square foot McConnelsville plant, then lease the facility back to Miba. Currently, Miba occupies only about half the building. The expansion is expected to cost at least $3.6 million and create 20 new jobs at the plant. The CIC made the move because Miba is a key employer in the area, with almost 300 people working in the McConnelsville facility. Miba AG is the holding company for a group of original equipment manufacturers which supply the international engine and vehicle industries. Miba Gleitlager AG began in 1947 and is the large-bearing market leader in Europe, second in the world. Its Bearing Group has operations in Austria, Germany, Singapore, Japan and the United States, manufacturing high-performance thinwall and heavywall bearings for diesel and gas engines. For Miba, the Bearing Group accounts for over 32% of corporate-wide sales. The McConnelsville heavywall bearing plant was acquired from Federal-Mogul in mid-2001. As the former Glacier Clevite Heavywall Bearings Division, the McConnelsville factory complex in southeast Ohio had approximately 270 employees and used 100,000 square feet of floorspace. The factory can produce half-shell, full-round or specially configured single-flange or double-flange hydrostatic journal bearings. It is the world's largest manufacturing plant for heavywall bearings destined for large diesel engines. McConnelsville originally opened in July 1952 to supply bearings for the aircraft industry. Heavywall bearing capacity was added in 1967. Since then, the plant has had a number of owners, among them Clevite, Gould Engine Parts Division, Imperial Clevite, T&N plc, and Federal-Mogul. Federal-Mogul acquired McConnelsville in its ill-starred $3 billion 1998 acquisition of British auto parts manufacturer, T&N plc (and the T&N acquisition brought with it asbestos liabilities from T&N's friction business which Federal-Mogul severely underestimated and later forced it into bankruptcy). In allowing the 1998 acquisition of T&N to proceed, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission required that Federal-Mogul divest all of T&N's polymer bearing and thinwall engine bearing operations, meaning the Glacier Vandervell and Clevite businesses. The thinwall operations were acquired by Dana Corp., which paid $140 million for Glacier Vandervell and $20 million for Clevite. Federal-Mogul was also required to divest the McConnelsville Strip Facility, which manufactured cast copper-clad strip to make the bearings. But F-M was allowed to keep the heavywall bearing business.