Overall, from 1992 to 1996 Mead was able to reduce its debt-to-capital ratio from 47 percent to 36 percent. The firm originally manufactured paper, but the company dramatically expanded its product line during the twentieth century. This allowed Mead to market effectively large quantities of specialty papers produced at Chillicothe as well as smaller quantities produced in the acquired mills. This firm became the nucleus of Mead's containerboard division. By the time of Daniel Mead's death in 1891, the Mead Corporation was one of the largest paper producers in the United States, with paper mills in Kingsport, Tennessee, Brunswick, Georgia, and Escanaba, Michigan, as well as several plants in Ohio. The company's future also seemed bright, as the April 1996 appointment of Jerome F. Tatar--a 23-year Mead veteran and former president (over an eight-year period) of Mead's Fine Paper Division&mdash president and chief operating officer (and expected Mason successor) pointed to the likelihood that Mead would continue on a steady course into the early 21st century. Mead managers sold more than $80 million of interests in low-growth markets between 1973 and 1976.
Although Mead had continued production at a breakneck pace to meet domestic and overseas container and paper requirements, wartime price and profit controls, as well as raw material shortages, stunted the company's growth. During the 1970s, the Mead Corporation also spent 1.5 billion dollars to modernize its various plants, allowing the firm to dramatically increase production. Diversification Beyond Paper Products in the 1950s. Mead expanded the paperboard business in the late 1920s with the purchase of mills throughout Appalachia that produced corrugating medium from wood waste. MDC also carried other services, such as LEXPAT, which distributed patent information, and LEXIS Financial Information Service, which provided stock information. During the first decade of its existence, Mead Paper Company averaged annual profits of $22,000, peaking at nearly $50,000 in 1891, the year of Mead's death. In addition, Mead's $1.5 billion five-year expansion plan begun in 1978 may have equipped it to benefit from the next paper market boom, but it also left the company in 1983 with a debt amounting to more than half of its total capitalization. Acquired Businesses Unrelated to Papermaking in 1960s. In November 1996 Mead increased its coated paper capacity by 600,000 tons a year with the $640 million purchase of a coated paper mill located in Rumford, Maine from Boise Cascade.
The Mead family is purported to have left from Lydd, Kent County, England aboard the ship “The Elizabeth,” believed to be in the company of Pastor Richard Denton and his Watford entourage, in April of 1635. Among the factors responsible were a drastic decrease in demand for lumber products and the costly settlement of the box suit. The Manistique plant was sold in the early 1950s, and the Virginia company was consolidated with the Wheelwright plant in 1946. Mead's management anticipated a boom in family spending and homebuilding and bought companies that would benefit from such a boom. He immediately upgraded the Dayton mill and in 1890 purchased a facility in nearby Chillicothe, Ohio. In 1988 LEXIS was responsible for MDC's 33 percent growth. By 1904 the Teutonia National Bank instituted a suit that resulted in trusteeship of the company by bankers in Dayton, Chillicothe, and Cincinnati, Ohio. Five Star® and Trapper Keeper® products give students the high-quality learning tools they need to succeed in the classroom.
In 1846, Daniel Mead founded the Mead Corporation in Dayton, Ohio. In 1920 Mead bought out the other owners of Kingsport Pulp. Micromedex, a subsidiary acquired in 1988, provided information about poison and emergency medicine on compact disc. By 1988 MDC boasted 200,000 subscribers, who bought $300 million worth of information. Mead also directed its attention to potential growth in paper; for example, the company responded to an anticipated hike in mail rates by investing $60 million in a computer-controlled paper machine to make lightweight paper.
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Mead Data Central Inc. (MDC), the subsidiary whose primary product was LEXIS, a service that made case law and statutes available through online computer searches, had been growing at a rate of 43 percent a year.