NEW YORK – More acquisitions are ahead for Dover Corp., the parent company of Dover Technologies. So said company executives during its annual investor conference today.

So far this year the company has closed eight deals, worth an estimated $1.07 billion, the biggest of which was a $750 million deal for Knowles Electronics, a maker of MEMS and other device packages.

Dover Technologies subsidiaries include Vitronics-Soltec, DEK, OK International, Everett-Charles Technologies and Universal.

ECT, which makes test equipment for bare boards and semiconductors, was Dover’s largest earning company in 2004 with over $300 million in sales. The company has invested over $400 million in test platforms since 1996, said Dover Technologies president and soon-to-be CEO Dave Van Loan. “There are lots of opportunities to grow this business through acquisitions, he said.

By segment, assembly made up 41% of Dover Technologies’ revenues, semiconductors 18%, PCBs 4% and product RFID 37% for the first half of 2005.

Dover Technologies’ compound annual growth rate was 15% from 1996 to 2005.

Sales at its DEK screen printing business are approaching 2000 levels and margins are topping 1999 levels, he said.

Van Loan said Dover Technologies’ Universal unit has struggled. “We missed the upturn in 2004 and had new product introductions that were not successful,” adding that those products are now gaining ground. “The business is profitable but we weren’t satisfied with its performance,” Van Loan said.

In response to an investor’s question over what went wrong, Van Loan said Universal suffered from “a little bit of bad luck along the way.”

 

“We thought the company was ready with some new products to introduce when the market took off again [but] these are complicated machines … and testing them in-house, sometimes the lab doesn’t test it well enough for the real world, and we were probably a year behind on the product development side when the market took off.”

Among the upcoming challenges: turnover in the management ranks. New presidents have been named at Vitronics-Soltec, OK International, Everett-Charles Technologies and Universal. Also, CEO John Pomeroy is set to retire in 2006.