had annual sales of approximately $15 million, more than half out of the automotive market, and ran its compounds off of three twin-screw and to single-screw extrusion lines.    

QTR (Evansville, IN) , formed in 1993, was awarded the Indiana Governor's Award for Excellence In Recycling in 1999 as well as the Indiana Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the Year for 2007. The acquisition of QTR officially was made thorough Matrixx, which also is based in Evansville. The assets of QTR and the engineered resins product line of The Matrixx Group will be combined into a new company, Matrixx-QTR. Running that company will be Rod Jackson, QTR's president, and Mary Perigo, its CFO. The Matrixx Group has seven compounding sites: five within the United States and two in Italy.  

Mike Fitzpatrick, chairman and CEO of Citadel, stated, "QTR employees will be staying with this acquisition, and we are excited to have them as new members of the Citadel team. We will continue to use the QTR brand name and product nomenclature to take advantage of their excellent positioning with customers." He is a former COO at additives supplier Rohm & Haas and told MPW in this interview that too often in the past the M&A action in the compounding market has focused too much on size, rather than strategically piecing together firms to realize genuine synergies.

The purchase brings to six the number of plastics-related acquisition by Citadel since 2007. Last September it acquired Fiberfil Engineered Plastics Inc. (Stoney Creek, ON); other pieces of the group include The Matrixx Group, its first, in 2007, and the world's largest supplier of bulk molding compounds, BMCI, in 2008. The full slate of companies is listed here.

According to Mike Huff, Citadel's COO, the hunt for further acquisitions continues. "We'll continue to look to make more acquisitions in engineered thermoplastics and thermosets, and we're going to explore our global options as well," he said.

Citadel, created by Fitzpatrick with support from Wind Point Partners, a Chicago-based private equity investment firm, has as its mission the "design and execution of a value creation strategy in the plastics compounding market." —[email protected]