Olympic Steel mulling future buys in all three of its segments

“Our overall strategy through M&A as well as cap-ex, we like all three of our business segments, so our intent is to grow all three of them,” CEO Richard Marabito said in an earnings conference call on Friday.

Olympic acquired Conway, Ark.-based Central Tube & Bar (CTB) in October last year.

“We’ve had, probably until CTB, we had a little bit of a greater focused success rate in terms of specialty metals and carbon on the acquisition side,” Marabito said. “That’s why we were thrilled really to add CTB to the mix.”

He said that Olympic is now five years into a strategy to build a more diversified company that “delivers results and creates shareholder value, even under challenging market conditions.”

Marabito noted that during that time, Olympic “successfully integrated six acquisitions, each of which has added a unique value-added offering to our portfolio.”

He pointed out that in January, the company announced the promotion of Zach Siegal to the new role of president of manufactured metal products.

“Zach has been with the company since 2007, and for the past six years, he’s played an instrumental role in our acquisition strategy,” adding that Siegal will remain involved in the company’s mergers and acquisition activity in the future.

Regarding what type of companies they are looking for, Marabito said Olympic is “gravitating towards those types of companies that really have a consistent return, high-return companies that we can add a good amount of synergy to through our existing operations.”

As that goes on, Marabito said, “We’re going to continue to do what you saw us do, which is add stand-alone fabricating facilities adjacent to some of our metal fabricating facility. So we like that model as well.”