Ecolab
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Formerly called
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Economics Laboratory |
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| Public | |
| Traded as | : ECL S&P 500 Component |
| Industry | Conglomerate |
| Founded | 1923 |
| Founder | Merritt J. Osborn |
| Headquarters | St. Paul, Minnesota, United States |
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Key people
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Douglas M. Baker, Jr (Chairman and CEO) |
| Revenue |
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Number of employees
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47,000 (2014) |
| Website | ecolab.com |
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Footnotes / references |
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Ecolab Inc., headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, is an American global provider of water, hygiene and energy technologies and services to the food, energy, healthcare, industrial and hospitality markets. It was founded as Economics Laboratory in 1923 by Merritt J. Osborn, and renamed "Ecolab" in 1986.
Merritt J. "M.J." Osborn founded Economics Laboratory in 1923 with the tagline "Saving time, lightening labor and reducing costs to those we serve." The company's original product was Absorbit, a product designed to quickly clean carpets in hotel rooms. This was soon followed by Soilax, a dishwasher soap. During the 1930s, the company expanded throughout the United States and sales reached US$5.4 million by the end of 1940s. It acquired the Magnus Company in the early 1950s, which gave the company access to Magnus's industrial specialty businesses - including pulp and paper, metalworking, transportation, and petrochemical processing.
In the 1950s, international expansion of Economics Laboratory started, with the establishment of its first overseas subsidiary in Sweden in 1956. It became a publicly traded corporation in 1957, and continued to expand during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1979, it acquired Apollo Technologies, but in 1983 the acquired Apollo subsidiary was shut down.
In 1986 the company changed its name from Economics Laboratory to Ecolab Inc.
In 1987, Ecolab purchased the lawncare servicer provider ChemLawn for US$376 million. It sold the acquisition in 1992 to ServiceMaster for US$103 million as it couldn't turn ChemLawn into a profitable business. Ecolab and the German fast-moving consumer goods firm Henkel KGaA formed a 50:50 European joint venture called 'Henkel-Ecolab' in mid-1991 to expand into European/Russian markets.
Ecolab would continue to acquire companies in the 1990s, namely Kay Chemical (1993), Australia-based Gibson Chemical Industries Ltd (1997), and GCS Service Inc (1998). In 2001 it bought out its partner Henkel's 50% stake in the European joint venture, Henkel-Ecolab. Ecolab integrated the former Henkel-Ecolab into its existing global operations. As a legacy of the Henkel-Ecolab cooperation from 1991–2001, Henkel continued to hold a 29.5% stake in Ecolab Inc. after the sale of the joint venture.
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