W. R. Grace and Company


W. R. Grace and Company is an American chemical business based in Columbia, Maryland. It produces specialty chemicals and specialty materials in two divisions: Grace Catalysts Technologies and Grace Materials and Chemicals. For much of its early history, Grace's main business was in South America, in maritime shipping, railroads, agriculture, and silver mining, with 30,000 employees in Peru. In the 1950s, Grace began to diversify and grew into a Fortune 100 worldwide conglomerate. After emerging from a prolonged bankruptcy period of 12 years in 2014, the company spun off its other major operating divisions, marking the end of the global Grace empire. As of December, 2017, it had 3,700 employees, with 1,900 in the United States and the balance in Europe and Asia. In 2017, the annual sales were US $ 1.72 billion.

History

W. R. Grace and Company was founded in 1854 in Peru, by William Russell Grace, who left Ireland during the Great Famine, and traveled to South America with his family. He went first to Peru to work as a ship's chandler for the firm of Bryce and Company, to the merchantmen harvesting guano, used as a fertilizer and gunpowder ingredient due to its high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen.
His brother Michael joined the business and in 1865 the company name was changed to Grace Brothers & Co. The company set up head office operations in New York City in 1865. Working in fertilizer and machinery, the company was formally chartered in 1872, and incorporated in 1895. The W. R. Grace Company expanded through the next century, creating myriad business divisions, including Grace Shipping, Grace Cruise Lines, Grace National Bank, Grace Petroleum, Grace Drilling, and Grace Healthcare. Grace acquired and combined other companies to create and expand businesses such as Barilla Pasta, FAO Schwarz, Ingersoll-Rand, Roto-Rooter, Del Taco, and Cartavio Distilleries. Under the leadership of the founder's grandson, J. Peter Grace, the company owned the country's largest oil-drilling fleet, ran the world's largest cattle ranch and the world's largest cocoa bean company; sugar plantations in Peru; cotton mills in Chile; silver, clay, phosphate, and tin mines; and processed rare earths for the US nuclear arms program. Grace owned a food group that operated 900 chain restaurant locations, a retail division with chains for sporting goods, home improvement, jewelry, aftermarket automotive parts, and leather goods. The company operated fertilizer companies, confectioners, and beverage companies, including Miller Brewing. Grace pioneered genetic engineering at its Agricetus division in Wisconsin, and human gene therapy at its Aurigent Pharmaceuticals group. The company constructed a 160-acre research complex, the Washington Research Center, in Columbia, Maryland. It also commissioned the New York City skyscraper, the W. R. Grace Building, as its world headquarters, in midtown Manhattan, from where it directed worldwide operations, including Grace Container Products, in Minhang China, the first wholly owned private business in communist China.
Grace listed on New York Stock Exchange with ticker GRA in 1953. In 1954, Grace acquired Davison Chemical Company and Dewey & Almy Chemical Company, establishing the basis for the current product lines.
On February 3, 2016, Grace spun off its Grace Construction Products operating segment and the packaging technologies business into an independent company, GCP Applied Technologies Inc.

Incorporation

There are two accounts of the incorporation date of W. R. Grace & Co. According to a New York Times account, the company was incorporated as part of estate and successor planning, in 1895. The three brothers consolidated most of their holdings into a new private company, incorporated in West Virginia, called W. R. Grace & Company. The consolidation involved W. R. Grace & Co. of New York, Grace Brothers & Co. of Lima, Peru, Grace & Co. of Valparaiso Chile, William R. Grace & Co. of London, and J. W. Grace & Co of San Francisco.
According to its website, W. R. Grace & Co. was incorporated in Connecticut in 1899. The listed capital of $6 million did not include Grace Brothers & Co. Limited in London or its branches in San Francisco, Lima and Callao, Peru, nor in Valparaiso, Santiago, and Concepción, Chile.
J. Louis Schaefer, who joined the company as a boy, played a key role in not only W. R. Grace & Company, in which he became a vice president, but also as president of Grace National Bank. Schaefer was a co-executor of the estate of Michael Grace with William's son and corporate successor, Joseph P. Grace. J. Louis Schaefer died in 1927.

Shipping

For most of its history, Grace's main business was cargo shipping. To get cargo from Peru to North America and Europe, including guano and sugar, and noticing the need for other goods to be traded, William Grace founded a shipping division. Grace Line began service in 1882, with ports of call between Peru and New York. Regular steamship service was established in 1893, with a subsidiary called the New York & Pacific Steamship Co., that operated under the British flag. Ships built outside the United States prior to 1905 were banned from US registry. US-flag service began in 1912 with the Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company. The activities of both companies and the parent firm were consolidated into the Grace Steamship Company beginning in 1916. The firm originally specialized in traffic to the west coast of South America; then later expanded into the Caribbean.
In 1916, Grace acquired a controlling interest in the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. In 1921, Pacific received five 535 ft. President class ships from the United States Shipping Board for transpacific operation. In 1923, the US Shipping board decided to place the five ships up for bid and Dollar Shipping Company won the bid. With no large ships for the transpacific operations Grace sold the Pacific Mail, its registered name, and goodwill to Dollar. Now without a transpacific service, Grace did not need the six intercoastal freighters and sold them off to the American Hawaiian Line. At this time Grace formed a new entity, the Panama Mail Steamship Company, to operate the smaller ships that were formerly owned and used by the Pacific Mail in the Central American trade. These ships were not involved in the sale to Dollar.
On the death of William R. Grace in 1904, he was succeeded by William L. Sauders as company president followed by Joseph Peter Grace, Sr. who became president in 1907. In 1938 the Colombian Line merged with Grace Line bringing an end to the Colombian Line. During World War II Grace Lines operated numerous transports for the U.S. War Shipping Administration.
J. Peter Grace, Jr. took over management of the company after his father suffered a stroke in 1945. After the war the Grace line operated 23 ships totaling 188,000 gross tons, and an additional 14 more on bareboat charters. In 1954 the company bought Davison Chemical Company, and the Dewey & Almy Chemical Company.
In 1960 Grace Line, inspired by the pioneering efforts of Sea-Land Service, Matson Navigation, and Seatrain Lines, sought to begin containerizing its South American cargo operations by converting the conventional freighters Santa Eliana and Santa Leonor into fully cellular container ships. However, the effort was stymied by the opposition of longshoremen in New York and Venezuela and the ships were repeatedly laid up idle and were ultimately sold to the domestic container line Sea-Land Service in 1964. In 1963 Grace made a second attempt to containerize its South American trade when it ordered the four M-class combination passenger-cargo ships Santa Magdalaena, Santa Maria, Santa Mariana and Santa Mercedes with partial cellular holds, but they were no more successful as mixing conventional break-bulk cargo and containers in the same ship negated the operating economies that full containerization promised.
The company bought a 53% stake in Miller Brewing in 1966, for $36 million; Lorraine Mulberger sold the stake for religious reasons. It sold the Miller stake in 1969 to Philip Morris for $130 million, topping a deal with PepsiCo for $120 million.
In 1969 Grace decided to exit the shipping business to concentrate on its chemical and diversification ventures. Grace Line was sold and merged into Prudential Line in 1970, which was renamed Prudential Grace Line, and was itself in turn taken over by Delta Steamship Lines in 1978, thereby extinguishing the name Grace in ocean shipping. Subsequently, Delta Steamship Lines was itself acquired and consolidated by Crowley Maritime in 1982.

Property nationalized

In 1974 the Peruvian government took ownership of the properties of W. R. Grace & Co., Harold Logan, Grace executive vice president, stated the company would join the in governmental level talks over compensation of expropriated American concerns. The loss of Grace's properties in Peru began in 1969, when 25,000 acres of sugarcane plantations were taken over in an agrarian reform. The sugar lands were at Paramonga, 110 miles north of Lima, and at Cartavio, near Trujillo, 200 miles farther up coast. Grace retained small mining operations producing copper, tin and silver, in southern Peru, about 100 miles north of Juliaca. Jose E. Flores, head of W. R. Grace S.A. Peru, closed the mining operations for Grace in Latin America when the government of Peru nationalized the remaining interests. In 1987, by building a can sealant plant in Shanghai, Grace became the first wholly foreign-owned company to do business in The People's Republic of China.

Airline

In 1928, Grace and Pan American Airways jointly formed Pan American-Grace Airways known as Panagra, establishing the first air link between the North and South America, that began operation in 1929.

Headquarters

The company has its headquarters in Columbia, an unincorporated census-designated place in Howard County, Maryland. Although W. R. Grace commissioned the Grace Building in New York City, built in 1971, the company no longer has any offices at that location.
Previously the company had its headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida. Prior to its closing, the Boca Raton headquarters had about 130 employees. On January 27, 1999, it announced it was moving its administrative staff to the Columbia office and closing the Boca Raton headquarters. About 40 of the employees went to Columbia, and some employees went to Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, the company emerged from a 13-year bankruptcy case stemming from asbestos claims, and immediately built a new 90,000 sq ft headquarters building on its 160-acre Columbia campus.

Subsidiaries and products

Subsidiaries and some of their products include:
W. R. Grace and Company has been involved in a number of controversial incidents of proven and alleged corporate crimes, including exposing workers and residents of an entire town to asbestos contamination in Libby and Troy, Montana, water contamination in Woburn, Massachusetts, and an Acton, Massachusetts, Superfund site.

Asbestos

While Grace no longer makes asbestos-related products, W. R. Grace and Company has faced more than 270,000 asbestos-related lawsuits, of which 150,000 have been settled or dismissed and 120,000 remain.
On April 2, 2001, Grace and its subsidiaries in United States filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy reorganization in Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. The company was trying to find the resolution through federal court-supervised reorganization in response to the quickly growing number of asbestos-related bodily injury claims.
On September 19, 2008, Grace filed a revised plan of reorganization to the same court, jointly by the asbestos injury claimants. In January 2011, the court issued an order in favor of the new plan and in January 2012, the court denied all appeals and affirmed the plan. After a motion for reconsideration, the plan was reaffirmed on June 11, 2012.
On February 3, 2014, Grace emerged from this asbestos-related Chapter 11 bankruptcy which took more than 12 years. Under the plan of reorganization approved by the court, all parties filings the asbestos-related claims should direct their inquiry to either an asbestos personal injury trust or a separate asbestos property damage trust.

In popular culture

In 1995, the European Patent Office granted a patent on an anti-fungal product derived from the neem tree to the United States Department of Agriculture and W. R. Grace. The Indian government challenged the patent when it was granted, claiming that the process for which the patent had been granted had been in use in India for more than 2,000 years. In 2000, the EPO ruled in India's favour, but W. R. Grace appealed, claiming that prior art about the product had never been published in a scientific journal. On 8March 2005, that appeal was lost and the EPO revoked the Neem patent.