Business View Magazine | January 2020

79 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 A IM AEROSPACE , INC . news for AIM was its recent acquisition by the Sekisui Chemical Company, Ltd., a ten-billion dollar company, based in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan for $510 million. Sekisui engages in the manufacture of high performance plastics for the medical, automotive, and information technology industries, as well as residential housing construction. Sekisui has nine facilities and offices spread across the U.S., but AIM will be its first on the West Coast. The buy of AIM is the largest acquisition ever made by Sekisui Chemical and will expand the company’s presence in the carbon fiber composites market and will increase sales of its thermoplastic resin materials for aircraft components. “It’s a huge step forward for us,” says Cagnatel. “Sekisui has been in business for more than 70 years. They don’t do aerospace, so we are going to be their aerospace division and they’re going to use their financial power and industrial power to help us grow and prosper and become a much bigger company than we had any aspiration to become, before. And their vision is to create a company that manufactures and sells to the customer with zero impact on the environment. They have a very strong corporate social responsibility; they’re trying to create a company that improves the world for their children and their children’s children. This is a fundamentally different long-term view than what we had before. When you’re part of a private equity group, your strategy tends to be relatively short- term.” “This is a company that wants to make sure that we stay stable; they don’t want to come in and change everything that we do,” Cagnatel adds. “It provides security for us, our customers, and our employees. They are very keen for us to think all the way to 2030, and to think about global expansion beyond the United States. They want us to look at doubling the size of our company both organically and acquisitionally, and they want us to expand our view of research and technology and become a more technologically- driven company while using their material