The Kardoes Rubber manufacturing site in La Fayette, Alabama, owned by Swedish rubber compounder Hexpol, is expected to close by December 31, 2019 according to a recent Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) list issued by the US Department of Labor.
Hexpol has estimated that the move would result in some 86 layoffs and said that costs related to ongoing integration and restructuring projects following its July acquisition of Preferred Compounding could total about US$10 million; it also revealed that the costs incurred mainly involved “the closing of two production units and Preferred’s head office”.
Kardoes Rubber was founded in the 1980s by Frank S. Kardoes, who sold the company to Hexpol, in 2014, for nearly US$32 million – the facility now boasts 131 million pounds of annual mixing capacity and produces a wide range of compounds for the automotive, building and construction, and OTR retreading markets, among others.