K-Tron International Inc. has announced the acquisition by its Jeffrey Specialty Equipment Corporatio subsidiary of all of the stock of privately-held Rader Companies Inc. The purchase price was $15.945 million.

Headquartered in Alpharetta, GA, Rader manufactures and markets a range of equipment including: pneumatic conveying systems, screening equipment, engineered storage and reclaim systems, and truck dumpers for processing bark and wood chips for the global pulp and paper and forest products industries; the Razorback sizer that is used to size bark and waste wood in wood fiber processing applications; and the EDK feeder/delumper which is used by the worldwide petrochemical industry in manufacturing polypropylene and polyethylene.

The company also has sales and service offices in Montreal and Vancouver, Canada and in Stockholm, Sweden. Tracing the origins of its business back more than 50 years, Rader has a well-established customer base in North America and throughout the world, resulting in significant repeat business, and replacement parts are an important aspect of that business. For the 12-month period ending June 30, 2007, Rader’s unaudited revenues were approximately $25 million.

Top operating management of Rader, which consists of seven of the nine former shareholders, will remain following the acquisition, including Tony Lubiani, President and CEO and head of sales, Richard Goncalves, President and General Manager of the company’s Canadian subsidiary and five other shareholders who have led Rader’s Engineering (Mike Barron), Purchasing (Fred Rogers), Customer Service (Ted Gentile), Sales Support (Conrad Matula), and R&D (Bryan Lanham) departments since the beginning of 2000. Mr. Lubiani will report to Don Melchiorre, Senior Vice President of K-Tron responsible for its Size Reduction Group.

Commenting on the transaction, K-Tron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Edward B. Cloues, II said, “The acquisition of Rader significantly expands the scope of K-Tron’s activities in the pulp and paper and forest products industries, which we have been serving through our Jeffrey subsidiary located in Woodruff, SC. The combination of the Jeffrey and Rader businesses over the next 12 to 18 months should enhance the strong position of each company as an equipment supplier to these industries, traditionally the primary customer base of both companies. The acquisition of Rader also provides K-Tron with a platform to participate in the rapidly growing worldwide business of biomass derived fuels, a new field that Rader has been pursuing successfully during the past two years.”

K-Tron International, Inc. and its subsidiaries design, produce, market, and service material handling equipment and systems for a wide variety of industrial markets. The company has manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the People’s Republic of China, and its equipment is sold throughout the world.