Hanson Aggregates East Inc history

In the same year it bought the Butterley Company for £4.7 million, an acquisition that took it into a new field of operations, the manufacture of bricks for house construction. Its principal objective was defined by James Hanson as "to expand profitability while achieving careful expansion through acquisitions." The purchase of Scottish Land Development in 1967 for £700,000 took Wiles into the hire and distribution of earthmoving and construction equipment and pumps.

In 1968 the conglomerate Slater Walker took a large shareholding in the Wiles Group.

More damning criticisms of the merger movement and its results in the United States were made by a United States congressional report in June 1971.

In the United States in 1976, Hygrade Foods, the second largest seller of hot dogs in ballparks, was acquired, along with other purchases in the food servicing and vending and textile industries.

Hanson's purchase, for £25 million, of Lindustries in the United Kingdom in 1979 was its largest to date and presaged a decade of even greater spending and growth, taking Hanson very definitely into the big league.

By 1984, with turnover up to over £2 million, Hanson was increasingly seen on both sides of the Atlantic as a predator, a reputation it enhanced in that year with the acquisition of the London Brick Company for £247 million, making Hanson the world's largest brick manufacturer.

In August 1989, when Minorco was obliged to admit defeat in its attempt to take over Consolidated Goldfields PLC, Hanson stepped in with a successful bid of £3.5 billion.

Despite the worldwide recession in the early 1990s, Hanson continued to be "expansion-minded," as the chairman phrased it in his 1990 letter to the company's shareholders.

For the first time since 1991, volume in the United States aggregates industry declined, ending Hanson Building's impressive streak of financial gains.

In April 1992 Hanson sold Ever Ready Ltd. to Ralston Purina Co. for £132 million, generating a £108 million profit.

Instead, Hanson returned to the strategy of divestiture, selling 15 companies for a total of $800 million by early 1994.

Also divested in 1995 were Suburban Propane and Cavenham Forest, an Oregon timber company holding 1.1 million acres of forest land.

1997: The de-merger of Hanson plc is completed, leaving the company focused exclusively on heavy construction materials.

Increased spending meant more business for Cornerstone, which ranked as the second-largest producer of ready-mix concrete in the country. "TEA-21 gives us lots of confidence for the future," Cornerstone's chief executive officer, Alan Murray, remarked in an April 1999 interview with Pit & Quarry.

The company and the two competitors ranking above it, Vulcan Materials and Martin Marietta, drove the consolidation of the industry, which was expected to "take another decade or two to run its course," according to Murray in the May 11, 2000 issue of the Financial Times.

In the first half of 2003, the company purchased quarries in Ohio and Kentucky.

By 2006 Hanson had become the world’s largest producer of aggregates.