Merger and spinoff of Phibro
In 1958, Engelhard's son Charles Jr. consolidated the family's holdings to form Engelhard Industries, Inc. as a publicly held company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1963, Engelhard, under the advisement of Lazard Frères, took a 20 percent interest in Minerals & Chemicals Philipp (MCP), a recently formed partnership between a small producer of nonmetallic minerals such as kaolin and fuller's earth, and Philipp Brothers, a trading firm specializing in the buying and selling of ores on the international market. Engelhard executed the transaction through a stock swap, giving up 8 percent of Engelhard as partial payment for the 20 percent interest in MCP.
Sales in MCP took off soon afterwards, mostly from Philipp Brothers' fast-growing ore trading. In 1964 it had sales of $US447 million, and by 1966 sales reached $US709 million. Even though Engelhard Industries did only about 40 percent of that figure, it was able, in September 1967, to work out a merger of the two companies that left the Engelhard family controlling about 40 percent of the new company. The new entity, which was called Engelhard Minerals & Chemicals Corporation (EMCC), was structured into three divisions: Minerals & Chemicals, which processed non-metallic minerals; Engelhard Industries, which refined and fabricated precious metals; and Philipp Brothers. Nearly one-half of the company's 1967 net income of $28 million was generated by the Philipp trading division, with the Engelhard metal processing contributing 34 percent and minerals and chemicals about 19 percent.
In the early 1960s, Engelhard developed a series of premium paint finishes for General Motors, marketed as Firemist paints using discs of calcium, sodium and borosilicate to produce truer colours, more intense shine, and better transparency and reflection than traditional metallics. The borosilicate was engineered to deliver more chroma, color purity, brightness, transparency and reflectivity. The finishes actually contained no aluminium or other metal particles and were thus not technically “metallic,” though often described as such. — though the manufacturing process of electro-depositing aluminized polyester flakes was expensive.[4] Firemist would later be used for finishes on its guitars by the Fender corporation.
Philipp's trading continued to enjoy phenomenal growth as the world turned to spot traders to move scarce natural resources around the globe. By 1972, EMCC's sales hit $US2 billion, about 80 percent of it supplied by Philipp, and in 1974 revenue reached $5 billion. By 1981, Philipp Brothers earned 89 percent of the total corporation's $US26.6 billion in revenues and 88 percent of its $US532.7 million in profits. Management in the slow growing minerals-and-chemicals division, along with those in precious metals, felt overshadowed by their trading counterparts. This led to the spinoff of Philipp Brothers (later called Phibro), and renaming what was left the Engelhard Corporation.
