Kito Americas Acquires Peerless Industrial Group

Kito Americas, Inc. has announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire Peerless Industrial Group from Westview Capital Partners II, L.P. by purchasing all the shares of Peerless.

The share transfer of Peerless shall be executed subject to the terms and conditions in the Stock Purchase Agreement. Kito Americas currently operates Harrington Hoists, Inc. and Kito Canada businesses in North America and is the largest subsidiary of the Kito Corporation of Japan. Kito is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Kito Americas will, by combining with Peerless, expand its product to better serve its customer segments around the world and strengthen its North American business. Kito Americas is currently a market leader in providing powered and manual overhead lifting products. Peerless is the largest manufacturer and distributor of chain and chain products in North America.

The combination of the Peerless, Harrington, and Kito brands will give combined customers access to a much wider variety of products in the markets currently served and also allow faster expansion of the Peerless products throughout Kito's global network. The final closing of the combination of these companies will occur in late August.

Ned Hunter, Kito America's president and CEO of Harrington Hoists, Inc., said: "Peerless' product portfolio integrates well with our core overhead lifting customers and also allows us to diversify our customer base. We expect to better serve our material handling customers by offering a much broader, high quality product range and also access new markets around the world through our global subsidiary operations and distribution networks. This combination allows us to better serve our rapidly growing customer base and also increases our global manufacturing footprint in order to streamline supply chains and provide seamless, high quality services. We are excited about this opportunity to increase our value to our customers and team members."

Tom Wynn, president and CEO of Peerless, said: "We recognize the dramatic opportunity with this joining of our businesses and feel this is a game changer within the industry. It is anticipated our combined customers and employees will realize significant value with this new partnership."

Yoshio Kito, president of Kito Corporation, said: "Both Peerless and Kito believe that the quality of products and services is critical to success. We also both believe that it is important to focus on our customers, and to do that, we need to have the best people in the industry. The combination of Peerless and Kito is perfect; we share a common philosophy."