Bucyrus International, Inc. (NASDAQ: BUCY) designs, manufactures and markets surface and underground mining equipment. Founded as Bucyrus Foundry and Manufacturing Company in Bucyrus, Ohio, in 1880, Bucyrus moved the headquarters to the current location in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1893. In its early history, Bucyrus produced steam shovels. The current product line includes a range of material removal and material handling products used in both surface and underground mining.
Caterpillar Inc. is purchasing Bucyrus in a US$8.6 billion transaction that is expected to close in mid-2011.

Bucyrus International, Inc. (Bucyrus), incorporated in 1927, is a designer and manufacturer of safe and productive mining equipment for the extraction of coal, copper, oil sands, iron ore and other minerals in major mining centers globally. In addition to the manufacture of original equipment, the Company also provides the aftermarket replacement parts and service for this equipment. It operates in two business segments: surface mining, including the principal products of Terex Mining, and underground mining. Its products and services are marketed under the Bucyrus name. It has manufacturing facilities in Australia, the People’s Republic of China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom and the United States, and service and sales centers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, People’s Republic of China, India, Indonesia, Peru, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. On February 19, 2010, the Company completed the acquisition of the mining equipment business (Terex Mining) of Terex Corporation.
Surface Mining Segment
The Company designs, manufactures and markets draglines, electric mining shovels, hydraulic excavators, off-highway haul trucks, rotary blasthole drills, hydraulic track drills and highwall miners used for surface mining and provide the aftermarket replacement parts and service for these machines. Its products are sold to customers globally in every market where surface mining is conducted with modern methods. Its surface mining original equipment includes draglines, electric mining shovels, hydraulic excavators, drills, off-highway haul trucks and highwall miners.
Draglines are used in coal mining applications to remove overburden by dragging a bucket through the overburden and carrying it away. Its draglines weigh from 1,900 to 8,400 tons and are described in terms of their bucket size, which typically range from 31 to 152 cubic yards. Mining shovels are used to load copper, coal, oil sands, iron ore, and other mineral bearing materials, overburden or rock into trucks. It offers a range of electric mining shovels, with available hoisting capability of up to 120 tons. During the year ended December 31, 2010, it introduced the 495HR2 and 495HF2 shovels that incorporate its designed operator’s cab featuring a operator’s control station. The Company’s range of hydraulic excavators begins in the 100 ton size class and reaches up to a 1,000 ton size. Its hydraulic excavators feature TriPower technology. Its hydraulic excavators have an average life of approximately seven to 15 years.
The Company offers a range of rotary blasthole drills ranging in hole diameter size from six inches to 17.5 inches. Its rotary blasthole drills have an average life of approximately 10 to 15 years. Modular design techniques have been applied to its rotary blasthole drills. It also offers a range selection of hydraulic track drills that range in holes diameter size from 2.5 inches to six inches for quarrying, construction and utility applications. Its hydraulic track drills have an average life of approximately seven to 10 years. Its truck business consists of a series of rear dump trucks ranging in size from 150 tons to 400 tons. High capacity surface mining trucks are off-road dump trucks. They are powered by a diesel engine driving an electric alternator that provides power to individual electric motors in each of the rear wheels. It trucks have an average life of approximately eight to 10 years.
The Company’s highwall mining equipment is used for mining of residual coal seams from the surface. This equipment is consisted of a self-contained coal mining system, which remotely mines underground coal from the surface of a surface mining operation to predetermined depths. It has an aftermarket business that supplies replacement and upgrade parts and services for its installed base of original equipment. Its aftermarket offerings include engineered replacement parts, maintenance and repair labor, technical advice, refurbishment and relocation of machines, comprehensive structural and mechanical engineering, non-destructive testing, repairs and rebuilds of machine components, product and component upgrades, turnkey assembly and equipment operation. Its international repair and maintenance services are provided through its global network of wholly owned foreign subsidiaries and overseas offices operating in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, the People’s Republic of China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru and South Africa.
Underground Mining Segment
The Company designs, manufactures and markets complete system solutions for underground coal mining globally. Its original equipment and aftermarket parts are manufactured in Germany, the United States, the People’s Republic of China, Australia and the Czech Republic. Its underground mining original equipment includes longwall equipment and room and pillar equipment. Its longwall equipment includes hydraulic roof supports and electro-hydraulic controls, automated plow systems, shearers and armored face conveyors, including entry conveyors with a built-in crusher. Its systems can be customized to suit a range of mining conditions.
Roof supports provide support to the mine roof during longwall mining. It offers a range of roof supports suitable for mining heights, from 0.6 meters to 7.5 meters, including Longwall Top Coal Caving (LTCC) roof supports that allow for recovery of some coal seams that exceed 7.5 meters and support capacities in excess of 1,200 tons per shield. It also offers electro-hydraulic roof support systems for automatic sequences or manually operated functions. A complete roof support system typically includes from 50 to 225 roof support shields. Its roof supports have an average minimum life of approximately nine to 12 years.
Armored face conveyors (AFC) are used in longwall mining to transport material cut by the shearer or plow away from the longwall face. Its AFC systems are designed for a range of performance requirements in low, medium and high seams and for short and long faces. It offers the controlled start transmission (CST) drive systems for faces, which allows for variable start speeds and precise load sharing. It AFC systems are purchased in pairs and the pair has an average life of approximately six to nine years. A longwall shearer moves parallel to the coal or mineral face, cutting into the coal as it moves backward and forward across the face, depositing the coal onto the conveyor system. It offers a range of shearers for low, medium and high seams, from 1.8 meters up to 7.0 meters, with production rates of up to 5,000 tons per hour. Its shearers are generally purchased in pairs and the pair has an average life of approximately six to eight years.
The Company’s plows have extraction and loading rates in seams of 0.6 meters to 2.3 meters resulting in mining rates of up to 3,500 tons/hour. Its automated plow systems have an average life of approximately four to 10 years. In addition to longwall mining equipment, it offers a range of room and pillar equipment. Its room and pillar equipment offerings include continuous miners, feeder breakers, battery- and diesel-powered underground utility vehicles, continuous haulage systems, roof bolters and belt systems. Its continuous miners can be used for both soft- and hard-cutting applications. It offers a seamless family of continuous miners for both soft and hard cutting applications for seams from 0.8 meters to 5.2 meters. Its continuous miners have an average life of approximately 8 to 12 years. The continuous haulage system is used to remove cut coal or other mineral from the working face to the main mine belts on a continuous basis. The system is usually attached to the miner or independently trammed behind the miner. Its systems can be implemented in new or existing operations with capacity of up to 38 tons per minute. Its continuous haulage systems have an average life of approximately 10 to 15 years.
The Company’s underground feeder breakers have a production capacity of up to 1,800 tons per hour with a pick force of up to 45,400 kilograms. The units are custom designed to allow maximum discharge rates from the mobile haulers. Its feeder breakers have an average life of approximately 10 to 20 years. It offers both battery-powered and diesel-powered haulage vehicles. Underground utility vehicles are self-loading vehicles used to clean roadways, haul supplies and perform other functions. Along with its two main product groups, it offers solutions in the field of horizontal crushing equipment for coal and non-coal applications, such as road construction, potash and rock salt. The product range includes size reduction technology for primary crushing and scraper chain conveyors.

The celebrations surrounding the anniversary, however, masked a marked dropoff in sales. Confronted with a mature market, Bucyrus began diversifying, buying Western Gear, a California aerospace firm, in 1982, and closing its plants in Idaho and Pennsylvania. With profits still sinking, Bucyrus formed a holding company named Becor Western in 1984 to ward off a hostile takeover. By 1987, however, Becor's consultants reported that "profitability was not likely to improve until 1990, if then" and that Western Gear was an insupportable drain on the corporate purse. Becor's management then made a fateful decision: they decided to sell Western and, in concert with their investment bankers, Goldman, Sachs and Co., execute a leveraged buyout (LBO) of Bucyrus, a move that made the corporation a private company and therefore promised management greater flexibility in steering the company to financial safety. The LBO also promised high cash distributions to shareholders and tax advantages stemming from the service of the debt on the LBO's bonds. It was in the assumption of massive debt--needed to give management the wherewithal to buy Bucyrus out--however, that the inherent risk of the LBO lay.
Shareholders approved the plan, which was completed in February 1988, with Becor broken up into Bucyrus-Erie and a new holding company named B-E Holdings. Damaged by Goldman, Sach's hefty fees, the LBO debt almost immediately began to bury Bucyrus. By the end of 1988, corporate debt had risen to $100 million and equity had plummeted to $16 million. Within a year, B-E Holdings was paying out $21 million annually just to service the interest on its debt. Worse yet, promising new orders only made matters worse. The LBO's financial projections were based on the assumption that Bucyrus would lose money in 1990 and 1991. Unanticipated profits only meant that Bucyrus would have to pay even higher levels of debt interest. Bucyrus returned to the financial market to raise more funds in order to avoid paying higher levels of debt interest. Rather than plow the money into much-needed working capital, however, the new influx of cash was applied to debt payment, and Bucyrus was caught in a vicious cycle of acquiring new debt to pay off old.
Following heated negotiations with its creditors, in 1993 Bucyrus proposed a restructuring plan in which it would file for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy but arrange with its creditors beforehand to trade them a combined 87 percent share of Bucyrus stock in return for forgiving $135 million in debt. All Bucyrus's creditors agreed to this so-called prepackaged bankruptcy except Jackson National Bank, which claimed in a lawsuit that false statements about Bucyrus's true financial health had fraudulently seduced it into lending Bucyrus $60 million. Jackson's suit threatened to torpedo Bucyrus's only hope of emerging from bankruptcy intact, and as it headed toward federal court its losses continued to mount. In February 1994, Bucyrus officially filed for bankruptcy, with a ten-month window to secure the judgment before new tax laws went into effect forcing it into further, probably fatal levels of debt. After ten months of deliberation the federal court announced that Bucyrus had been awarded the debt-for-equity bankruptcy it sought and could retain control of its own fate. The worst crisis in its history was over.
Ironically, Bucyrus remained not only a viable but a significant player in the world excavation machinery business before its slide toward bankruptcy began to seem inevitable. The opening of the South African mining machinery market promised greater sources of new sales, and, more importantly, a 1988 contract to provide mining machines to China had been followed by an even larger Chinese order in 1993. And China held the potential of becoming the largest customer for the mining machine industry in the world. If the U.S. market for new mining machinery was exhausted, a large untapped international market seemed capable of offsetting the loss, and between 1994 and 1995 Bucyrus's net sales actually increased almost 20 percent to $232 million.
In July 1995, three senior Bucyrus executives quietly resigned, and a management consulting group shepherded the company during a search for a new CEO. In March 1996, W. R. Hildebrand became president and CEO. He announced the goal of making Bucyrus a customer-driven, employee-empowered enterprise with a modernized accounting system and a new computerized data system. With exports accounting for almost 70 percent of all shipments and new foreign markets offering Bucyrus a chance to grow itself back to health, in May 1996, shareholders officially approved the rebirth of Bucyrus-Erie as Bucyrus International.
Principal Subsidiaries: Bucyrus-Erie Company of Canada Ltd;. Bucyrus Europe Ltd.; Bucyrus (Australia) Proprietary Ltd.; Minserco, Inc. (United States); Boonville Mining Services, Inc. (United States); Bucyrus (Brasil) Ltda.; Bucyrus India Private Ltd.; Bucyrus (Africa) (Proprietary) Ltd.; Bucyrus Chile Ltda.; Bucyrus (Mauritius) Ltd.


OVERALL
Beta: 2.21
Market Cap (Mil.): $7,443.71
Shares Outstanding (Mil.): 81.45
Annual Dividend: 0.10
Yield (%): 0.11
FINANCIALS
BUCY.O Industry Sector
P/E (TTM): 22.29 23.24 17.05
EPS (TTM): 7.82 -- --
ROI: 8.93 8.41 3.26
ROE: 17.37 13.44 5.84

Statistics:
Public Company
Incorporated: 1927
Employees: 1,166
Sales: $231.92 million (1995)
Stock Exchanges: NASDAQ
SICs: 3532 Mining Machinery

Name Age Since Current Position
Rogers, Theodore 76 2004 Independent Chairman of the Board
Sullivan, Timothy 57 2004 President, Chief Executive Officer, Director
Mackus, Craig 58 2006 Chief Financial Officer, Secretary
de Leon, Luis 45 2007 Chief Operating Officer
Tate, William 60 2007 Executive Vice President
Bosbous, John 58 1998 Treasurer
Purdum, Robert 75 2004 Independent Director
Little, Gene 67 2004 Independent Director
Scharp, Robert 64 2005 Independent Director
Jones, Paul 62 2006 Independent Director
Ortberg, Robert 50 2008 Independent Director
Collins, Michelle 50 2009 Independent Director
Kapur, Deepak 58 2009 Independent Director

Address:
P. O. Box 500
South Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53172
U.S.A.
 
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