In 1912, the Piston Ring Company officially opened for business in Muskegon, Michigan. The company designed and manufactured original equipment components for Detroit’s largest car companies and quickly earned a reputation for quality products serving the rapidly developing automobile industry.
After acquiring the Accuralite Company in 1931, the company changed its name to “Sealed Power Corporation” and started manufacturing piston rings, pistons and cylinder sleeves for military applications. By the 1950s, the company had distributors in every state and in more than 40 countries. At the time, Sealed Power products were used as original equipment in more than 80 percent of American-made cars and trucks.
By 1988, and after a number of strategic acquisitions to further diversify the company into a replacement parts and specialty service tool manufacturer, the company changed its name to SPX Corporation. For the next 10 years, we remained a U.S.-centric automotive component manufacturer with nearly $1 billion in sales.
In 1998, a series of additional acquisitions and focused organic growth helped SPX Corporation diversify even further, culminating with the acquisition of General Signal Corporation in October of that year. SPX continued to grow and diversify through acquisition and ultimately acquired United Dominion, Inc., in 2001. As part of that acquisition, the company moved its corporate headquarters to Charlotte, North Carolina. Beginning in 2004, the company started to shift to a narrower focus on key end markets related to power and energy, food and beverage, and industrial process infrastructure. As a result, SPX Corporation sold off several businesses and re-invested in strategic acquisitions that helped anchor its growth in those end markets. This strategy resulted in SPX exiting the automotive industry entirely with the sale of its Service Solutions business in 2013.
On October 29, 2014, SPX announced that its Board of Directors had unanimously approved a plan for a tax-free spin-off of its Flow Technology reportable segment, its Hydraulic Technologies business, and certain segments of its corporate subsidiaries. The spin-off was designed to create two separate, stand-alone, publicly traded companies: SPX FLOW, Inc., a company focused on providing highly engineered technologies and services to customers in the global food and beverage, power and energy, and industrial markets; and SPX Corporation, a diversified, global supplier of infrastructure equipment with a scalable heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) platform, leading positions in niche detection and measurement markets, and a strong presence in engineered solutions for industry. The spin-off transaction was completed on September 26, 2015.
With more than $1 billion in annual revenue in 2020 and over 4,000 employees in 15 countries, SPX offers a wide array of highly engineered infrastructure products with strong brands.
