FMC Corporation

FMC Corporation is a leading producer of industrial and specialty chemicals and maintains interests in defense systems, gold mining, and its historical base, machinery and equipment. Having grown to include a diverse group of products and industries in the early 1990s, the conglomerate was struggling to achieve better organization and healthier returns from its businesses. The roots of the FMC Corporation lie in the John Bean Spray Pump Company established in California in 1884 when Bean invented the hand spray pump. Over the next 34 years, he built his product into the preferred pump in the region. Another prosperous local firm in the 1920s was Frank L. Burrell's cannery. The two merged in 1928 to form the John Bean Manufacturing Company, which changed its name to the Food Machinery Corporation the next year. From this manufacturer of simple food production equipment the diverse FMC was to grow. Bean, not a businessman by nature, passed the management of the company on to his son-in-law, David Christian Crummey, at a fairly early point in time. Upon the merger, control passed on to his son, John David Crummey. While the younger Crummey was a strong voice leading the firm, the hand of another man was evident in the company's actions. This man was Paul L. Davies, Crummey's son-in-law, who left a banking vice-presidency to become vice-president of Food Machinery. The policies of growth which Davies put into effect kept the company financially healthy throughout the Depression. Davies recognized the cyclical nature of purely agricultural businesses; they depended too much on crop fluctuations. In 1933, therefore, the firm began to expand by purchasing the Peerless Pump Company, whose inexpensive pumps were in high demand during these lean years. This was the beginning of a policy of diversification which was to bring the company into increasingly varied and prosperous areas. Food Machinery not only survived the Depression, it prospered, and emerged in the early 1940s prepared for the consistent growth which was to characterize it under Davies. An aggressive and energetic man who worked 12 hour days, Davies used diversification as both a means of expanding the company's market and a hedge against cyclical weakness in any one branch. In 1943, the company made its first foray into the chemical market by acquiring the Niagara Sprayer and Chemical Company, a strong independent manufacturer of insecticides and fungicides. This move was followed by the 1948 acquisition of Westvaco Chemical Corporation, which produced industrial chemicals. The Niagara merger left Food Machinery in the position of producing not only sprayers and pumps, but the chemicals to put through them; the later merger, upon which the company became the Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation, expanded their chemical product line even more. Alongside this chemical expansion, Food Machinery's equipment division prospered in the 1940s due to the Second World War. Some months before the United States entered the war, Food Machinery began producing the "Water Buffalo," an amphibious tank which provided important troop mobility over the next crucial years. Other products were adapted for wartime uses as well, such as the orchard sprayer, which was to be used for decontamination purposes if necessary, and nailing machines which produced ammunition boxes at an exceedingly high rate. Every year between 1950 and 1966 the Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation (which changed its name to the FMC Corporation in 1961) showed a financial gain, and the company was a favorite of investors. Their trend toward diversification continued, most notably with the purchase of the American Viscose Corporation in 1963, despite opposition from the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Davies' vigor, vision, and talent for profitable purchases provided a strong center for the company's rather loose management through 1966. In this year, Davies decided to retire. His strategy was t