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Techtronic Buys Hoover for $107 million

Whirlpool Corp. announced it will send its vacuum cleaner subsidiary company, Hoover, to Techtronic , a Hong Kong-based owner of Dirt Devil, for $107 million, in a move intended to allow the company to focus on its core-business, appliances, including the Maytag and KitchenAid brands. Techtronic manufactures products under the brands Ryobi and Milwaukee. It vacuum cleaner brands in the US include Dirt Devil and Regina, as well as, Vax in the UK. Techtronic said it would zealously invest in the Hoover product which has been around for nearly 100 years and has an iconic status in many countries.

In recent years Hoover has been struggling with high costs, fierce competition and a lack in new technology. Whirlpool purchased Hoover as a part of a larger deal in which the company purchased Maytag for $1.7 billion in August last year. This deal turned Whirlpool into the largest manufacturer of household appliances in the world. Maytag announced in February that it intends to put Hoover up for sale, due to the company`s growing losses and shrinking sales. In the third quarter of 2005 Hoover sales dropped 20%, critically hurting the company`s profitability. Maytag purchased Hoover in 1989 in a deal worth $1 billion.

In 1907 Murray Spangler, a carpet cleaner in a department store in Ohio, developed a crude design of what was to become the first vacuum cleaner. Spangler presented his invention to a friend Suzanne Hoover, whose husband owned a company that manufactured leather products. Suzanne interested her husband who decided to buy the patent from Spangler and start a vacuum cleaner company named after himself ? Hoover. In 1908 Hoover sold his first vacuum and the rest is history.