GREENSBORO, NC — Mark Kozberg, a Cone Mills investor and board member, has put together a group of investors to oppose the company’s recently disclosed plan to recapitalize, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Kozberg, who bid to take the company private in 1999, said the investors group holds an 8.9 percent stake in the company. They are soliciting proxies for the election of a slate of directors at Cone’s next annual meeting.
The group’s nominees include Charles Barry, a Minneapolis businessman; Randall Kominsky, chief investment officer of CRP Holdings Inc., a private investment firm; and Edward S. Adams, the Howard E. Buhse professor of law and finance and co-director of Kommerstad Center for Business Law and Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota.
Those additional directors would give Kozberg’s group four seats on the 11-member board.
Last month, the denim maker struck a preliminary deal that would allow it to pay for a new manufacturing plant in Mexico. Cone said it entered into a letter of intent with WLR Recovery Fund II, a fund managed by W.L. Ross and Co., to buy up to $27 million of convertible notes to support a recapitalization of the company’s balance sheet to pay for the plant.
Meanwhile, the company said Thursday that in 2002 it experienced its first profitable year since 1994. The company made $3 million, or 8 cents a share, in the fourth quarter after losing $1.4 million, or 10 cents a share, in the comparable quarter last year.
Sales for the quarter rose 15.5 percent to $102.3 million, compared to $88.6 million for the same 2001 quarter.
DANVILLE, VA — Dan River Inc. last week reported net income of $4.2 million, or 19 cents per diluted share, for the fourth quarter.
These results compare to a net loss of $10 million, or 46 cents per share, for the fourth quarter of 2001. Net sales were $153.2 million, up $7.4 million or 5.0 percent from $145.8 million.
For 2002 sales were $612.9 million, down $18.1 million or 2.9 percent from $631.1 million. Before the effect of a change in an accounting principle, Dan River reported income of $7.4 million, or 33 cents per share, for fiscal 2002, compared to a net loss of $20.9 million, or 96 cents per share, for 2001.
“At this time last year, we had set in motion a plan that would allow us to return to our historic levels of profitability,” said Joseph L. Lanier Jr., chairman and CEO. “All the necessary actions had been taken to bring inventory and capacity levels more in line with the current business environment.”
COLUMBUS, GA — Saying it was caught in the “severe downturn” of the U.S. textile industry, fabric producer Johnston Industries, Inc. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The company, founded in 1972, filed the petition Jan. 31 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of Georgia.
Johnston intends to phase out production of simple poly-cotton commodity fabrics that have been hurt by lower-priced imports from Asia, according to reports. Instead, the manufacturer said it will focus on higher-end weaves for industrial and automotive customers.
“The market is not going to allow U.S. textile companies to compete in commodity markets,” James Murray, Johnston’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, told The Columbus Ledger-Inquirer. “So we have to structure the company to play to its strength, and that’s our well-known reputation for producing high-quality engineered fabrics that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Johnston Industries recently reduced its work force by 200 at two plants in Opp, AL. About 1,500 employees remain with the company at eight plants in Alabama and Iowa. The company did not say if it intends to lay off any more employees.
Johnston hasn’t established a timetable to exit from bankruptcy, company officials said.
The company is organized as two autonomous business units — the JI Fabrics Division and the Fiber Products Division, according to the company’s Web site. JI Fabrics includes the company’s former Greige Fabrics and Finished Fabrics divisions.
In 2000, CGW Southeast Partners IV LLP, an Atlanta investment firm, bought Johnston Industries, taking it off the New York Stock Exchange and making it a privately held company. This was closely followed by the restructuring of Johnston’s JI Fabrics manufacturing operations, which resulted in the consolidation of Columbus Mill into the other facilities.
In November, Johnston sold the Composite Reinforcements division.
Johnston’s JI Fabrics Division includes Southern Phenix Textiles and Stitchbond in Phenix City, AL; the Shawmut Finishing Complex and Distribution operation in Valley, AL; Opp and Micolas Mills in Opp, AL; and TexTest, a certified testing laboratory located in Valley, AL, which is used by Brooks Brothers and other manufacturers of fine apparel to ensure conformity with their stringent performance requirements.
NEW YORK — Brian Gardunia, who last year was awarded a “Research Fellowship” as part of Cotton Incorporated’s Agricultural Research’s Breeding and Genetics Initiative, tied for first place in a student paper presentation competition at the Beltwide Cotton Conference in Nashville, TN, last month.
The topic of Gardunia’s paper was “Drought Resistance Screening,” which described a novel technique for screening cotton genetic populations for drought resistance.
Gardunia received his bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University in Provo, UT with a concentration in plant breeding. He received his master’s degree in plant breeding last summer, also from BYU.
Gardunia began his doctorate program in August 2002 at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX, where his area of research focuses on transferring genes for fiber quality and other important traits from related cotton species into modern cotton varieties.
The Cotton Fellows (CIF) program was launched in early 2002. Five stellar graduate students were recruited nationally in its inaugural year and all are involved in cotton breeding research projects under the Cotton Breeding Initiative. These projects will significantly enhance the germplasm base in cotton breeding today and many years in the future.
