In a perverse sort of way, the shuttering of plants all around the country is good news for David Hosea and Northern Kentucky.

        Mr. Hosea's rigging-and-moving business, Hosea Worldwide, is transporting equipment for many of those facilities, as companies consolidate into fewer plants and lay off workers.

        To house his growing operations, Mr. Hosea moved in November into the old Gibson Greetings building on 3L Highway in Kenton County. He will keep facilities in Bellevue and on Cincinnati's west side, but the 300,000-square-foot building will be the hub of future operations at Hosea Project Movers.

        “To be honest, we were going to try to move everybody here, but it's not big enough,” said Mr. Hosea. “We've got more work than we've ever had. When the economy goes bad, we just go through the roof.”

        Two signs of that: First, the company is considering expanding the building next year. And second, it is looking to add to its current payroll of about 200.

        Mr. Hosea would not reveal what he paid for the vacant building, which he bought from American Greetings Corp., the Cleveland company that bought Gibson in March 2000.

New year, new press

        A new $3 million press is the centerpiece of a $4.5 million capital project at Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.'s DI-NA-CAL label plant in Norwood.

        With some older presses retired and the new one to be installed in 2002, the unit will increase its capacity by about one-third, officials there said.

        The company makes labels for brands such as Coca-Cola Co.'s Minute Maid.

Sell-off seen

        Loyalty to the mother ship has given Procter & Gamble Co. shareholders a reputation as buy-and-hold investors.

        But now that Jif and Crisco are being sold to J.M. Smucker Co., analysts are wondering if the reputation will stick.

        The scenario: Will P&G shareholders, who will own about 52 percent of Smucker's shares, sell all that stock immediately after the deal closes in what analysts have dubbed “the April Avalanche”?

        Prudential Securities analyst John McMillin thinks so. He predicted that 40 percent of the shares could be sold right away.

        “Many of those large-cap investors are not interested in owning a small position in a $2 billion mid-cap stock,” he said in a Dec. 11 report on Orrville-based Smucker.

        Particularly since Jif and Crisco need fixing, Mr. McMillin added. He noted that sales in the two brands have declined to a combined $615 million last year.

        “The bad news is that these two brands have been squeezed for excessive profits by P&G, leaving (Smucker) with the urgent need to reinvest,” Mr. McMillin said.

        The good news, he said, is that the brands should be easy to fix, given Crisco's dominant market share and Jif's mixing with Smucker's jellies and jams.

        E-mail Cliff Peale at cpeale@enquirer.com or call 768-8573.

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