Olin history

Then-unrelated to Olin, Mathieson Alkali Works began business in Saltville, Virginia, and in 1893 acquired its neighbor, the Holston Salt and Plaster Corp.

Olin's blasting and gunpowder company expanded ambitiously into the production of cartridges in 1898 to compete with the large East Coast ammunition companies and to supply the West from a Midwest base with reduced transportation costs.

The Du Pont family and their Gunpowder Trust acquired 49 percent of Olin's company in 1909, and they nearly replaced Olin, who scrambled for the remaining 51 percent and retained control.

In 1931, Western bought the Winchester Company.

Olin merged the two in 1935, forming Winchester-Western.

In 1944, the various Olin businesses were brought together under the corporate name of Olin Industries and management transferred from Franklin Olin to his sons, John and Spencer.

Starting in 1947 Nicholls, with the help of his friend John Leppart, had transformed Mathieson, a small regional chemical company which concentrated on a few commodity chemicals, into a company with $366 million in sales.

In 1949, Mathieson expanded into industrial and agricultural chemicals when it became a producer of sulfuric acid, fertilizers and pesticides.

In 1950, it built a plant at Brandenburg, KY to process natural gas into organic chemicals – the current site of Olin flexible polyols production.

The idea of a merger was first broached in 1951, but discarded because a satisfactory division of power did not seem possible.

In 1952, the Mathieson Chemical Company, as it was known by then, acquired a controlling interest in the pharmaceutical firm of E. R. Squibb & Sons (now part of Bristol-Myers Squibb).

Major 1953 Merger Transforms Company

1954 Merged to create the

The first acquisition of Olin-Mathieson was in 1955 when Blockson Chemical Co. of Joliet, I11., a manufacturer of industrial phosphates, was acquired.

Sales for that year were a disappointing $20 million, although Bill Hanes had said in 1956 that sales would soon be hitting $1 billion.

The lack of communication and poor diversification strategy led to the 1957 purchase of an aluminum plant.

The August 1958 issue of Fortune magazine accused the company of allowing itself to be constantly side-tracked.

John Olin retired in 1963; the following year, the company brought in hardware experienced executives to run Winchester.

In 1967 Grand planned a program of expansion into recreation, housing, lumber, and chemicals.

In 1968, for example, the head of Squibb convinced Olin to sell that division so that it could realize its full earnings potential.

The company became the Olin Corporation in 1969, and began to sell off many of its acquired businesses.

In the late 1970’s housing and Winchester Arms took on the role of the ill-fated aluminum works in suppressing profits.

Sudden Death Changes Management Ranks in 1971

In 1974 the next president of Olin, James Towey, was able to boast an 80 percent jump in earnings, largely due to the sale of the aluminum operations and polyester film factories which had been depressing earnings.

In addition to the above-mentioned, Olin Corporation was the first United States corporation to be prosecuted for violations of the arms embargo, and eventually was convicted in the early 1978 for selling Winchester rifles to private dealers in South Africa.

After ongoing declines in its business at Winchester, on December 12, 1980, Olin made the decision to sell Winchester firearms to the firm's employees under the name US Repeating Arms Company.

1981 Winchester's firearms operations are sold off but the ammunition business remains.

In 1984, Olin entered the electronic chemicals business with the acquisition of Philip A. Hunt Chemical.

In 1985 the profitable but slow-growing paper division was sold, along with the last of the home-building concerns.

In 1991 Johnstone announced another round of streamlining, divesting several under-performing chemical lines and its European sporting ammunition business.

In 1992 the company established a new aliphatic diisocyanate (ADI) unit in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which prepared it for a major push into the area of performance urethanes, used in coatings for products on cars and appliances.

In early 1994 Olin acquired GenCorp's Aerojet medium caliber ammunition business, making Olin one of only two United States producers of medium caliber ammunition.

In order to expand its supply operations to the microelectronics industry, Olin built a new 211,000-square-foot plant in Mesa, Arizona, to produce a chemical used in the production of semiconductors, which was scheduled to open in the fourth quarter of 1995.

Olin sold its European Winchester ammunition business, and also licensed the Winchester brand name, to GIAT (of Versailles, France). Olin transferred its ball propellant manufacturing plant to General Dynamics subsidiary St Marks Powder in 1998.

A decade later, after a decline in the chemical businesses, Olin spun off its specialty chemicals business on February 8, 1999 as Arch Chemicals, Inc. and went back to the mid-Western portion of its roots with just ammunition, brass and chlor-alkali.

The company rebounded in 2000, as sales totaled $2.5 billion and earnings per share jumped to $1.80.

The company then grew its core businesses through the $49 million acquisitions of Monarch Brass & Copper Corp. in June 2001.

The company then added Chase Industries Inc. in 2002, paying $176 million in stock.

Since 2004, the Olin Corporation has been moving some manufacturing of its Winchester products from East Alton to Oxford, Mississippi, which started with the rimfire cartridge (.22LR) production, then its load and pack operations.

In 2006, Olin announced that it had entered into a new license agreement with Browning Arms Company to market Winchester brand rifles and shotguns.

After still further re-evaluations of its business, Olin announced the sale of its Brass Division in October 2007, and lost $140 million in the sale.

In 2010, the company announced the move of centerfire manufacturing to Oxford, Mississippi.

2012 Distributing Acquired K.A. Steel Chemicals Inc., distributor of caustic soda and the largest seller of bleach in the Midwest

On October 5, 2015, Olin acquired The Dow Chemical Company’s US chlor alkali and vinyls, global epoxy and chlorinated organics businesses.

On February 15, 2017, Olin became the 24th company to celebrate 100 years of continuous listing on the New York Stock Exchange [NYSE: OLN] and in June of the same year was included on the Fortune 500 list for its fourth time.