New Fortitech owner: 'We want this team to continue'
The Business Review by Adam Sichko, Reporter
Date: Thursday, November 8, 2012, 10:35am EST - Last Modified: Thursday, November 8, 2012, 10:44am EST
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Fortitech, Schenectady, acquistition
A forklift driver inside Fortitech's Glenville, New York, facility. A board member for DSM, which is acquiring Fortitech, says the team in the Schenectady area will "continue to run their highly successful model."
Adam Sichko
Reporter- The Business Review
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The new owners of Fortitech Inc. said Thursday that founder Walt Borisenok and the company's Schenectady operations will remain in place.
Fortitech, headquartered in Schenectady, will be bought by DSM NV, a publicly traded conglomerate based in the Netherlands. The $634 million purchase was announced at 1:15 a.m. eastern time, before the European markets opened for the day.
"We want this team to continue to run their highly successful model," DSM board member Stephan Tanda told me in an interview this morning. "Walt will be staying put, absolutely. No doubt Schenectady will be a very important part of the overall operation."
This is perhaps the largest acquisition of a homegrown area company since 2006, when Royal Philips Electronics paid $1.3 billion for Intermagnetics General Corp., which makes magnets for MRI machines. Borisenok detailed his company's latest activity in China, India and Poland to me in a September interview.
Fortitech mixes nutrients, vitamins and minerals into blends that boost the energy and nutritional content of food and beverages. Its customers are among the world's largest food and drink companies.
Fortitech started in the Rotterdam Industrial Park 26 years ago, growing to a $260 million-a-year business with EBITDA of $70 million, according to DSM. Fortitech has 520 employees worldwide, 200 of whom work out of the company's home base in Schenectady or a distribution facility in nearby Glenville.
DSM develops and produces raw ingredients such as vitamins, Omega-3, enzymes and other nutrients and extracts. The company has $12 billion of worldwide sales; a quarter of that comes from the U.S., where DSM has 4,500 employees.
Fortitech plays a different role in the same space. The company buys raw ingredients—1,400 of them—and blends them together.
"We've always been quite impressed. They can do any ingredient, any application, anytime, anywhere," Tanda said. "Much blending activity was historically done by the customers themselves. Fortitech lifts that complexity from the customer. They have a unique service model that can respond on very short notice."
Tanda said he first met Borisenok over dinner in the U.S. five years ago.
"It's really been this year that we got serious about coming to a transaction, that things really got going in earnest," Tanda said. "It always takes two to tango. There was a meeting of the minds."
Tanda declined to elaborate on how the purchase came together.
Patrick Morris, a company spokesman, responded to attempts to reach Borisenok on Thursday.
"Please do not contact Walt, or [CFO] Brian [Wilcox], or anyone else at Fortitech. All of the info that is available to the media was in the press release that was issued," Morris said in an email.
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