Hardinge Buys Bridgeport; Will Maintain Bridgeport Brand and Sales

Hardinge, a leading global machine tool company with annual sales in excess of $200 million, has announced that it has acquired the major assets of the well-known British machine tools manufacturer Bridgeport Machines Ltd., which had gone into receivership. As a result, 62 Bridgeport employees in the UK and the Netherlands have joined the Hardinge Group. The Bridgeport brand will continue, and Hardinge says it will work to ensure continuity to Bridgeport’s existing customers.

The Bridgeport brand will be added to Hardinge’s existing portfolio of brands, which includes Hardinge high-precision lathes, Kellenberger and Tschudin cylindrical grinding machines, Hauser jig grinding machines, Tripet internal grinding machines, and Hardinge collets, chucks, indexing fixtures, and other industrial products.

Hardinge has had a business relationship with Bridgeport since 2002, when it began manufacturing Bridgeport’s knee mill products in the USA. Now Hardinge has acquired Bridgeport’s intellectual property rights, as well as its sales and support services division. This is expected to significantly increase Hardinge’s presence in the vertical and horizontal machining center market. Hardinge sales outlets around the world will have access to Bridgeport’s knee mill products, for example.

Said Bob Duxbury, managing director of Hardinge Machine Tools Ltd., at the time of the announcement: “Bridgeport has an excellent reputation and brand in the marketplace, and we are excited by this acquisition and the opportunities available by adding the Bridgeport brand to our portfolio. In the long term we believe that we can grow Bridgeport’s sales, just as we have with our existing brands.”

J. Patrick Ervin, president and CEO of Hardinge Inc. in the United States, added: “We are excited to continue the tradition of the Bridgeport name and to provide worldwide customers with uninterrupted service and spare-parts support for the large installed base of Bridgeport machines. In England and Holland, we will be adding 62 knowledgeable, dedicated, and hard-working people to our organization. We are glad to have them as part of the Hardinge team.”

Ervin continued, “We will continue to look for opportunities to expand our product lines and global reach in the machine tool market. Hardinge’s growth strategy was started over a decade ago, and we remain committed to being a consolidator of valuable brands and operations in our industry.”

Hardinge Inc. (NASDAQ: HDNG) founded more than 100 years ago, is an international leader in providing the latest industrial technology to companies requiring material-cutting solutions. The company designs and manufactures CNC metal-cutting lathes, machining centers, grinding machines, collets, chucks, indexing fixtures, and other industrial products. It has manufacturing operations in the USA, Switzerland, Taiwan, and China, and distributes machines in all major industrialized countries.