Finance History | 11 Wall Street — A Phenolic Socket Came Back to the Tape as APH

People treat Amphenol as a Wallingford campus and a drawer of radio-frequency connectors.

The ticker on this floor is a second listing, not a first founding.

Arthur J. Schmitt started American Phenolic Corporation in Chicago in 1932 around a molded radio-tube socket. The name is a portmanteau of that first firm.

The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1957, then spent the next decades inside other books. Bunker Ramo bought it in 1967. Allied took Bunker Ramo in 1981.

In 1987 LPL Investment Group, Larry DeGeorge's Wallingford family vehicle, bought the Amphenol unit in a leveraged buyout reported at 430 million dollars in 1987 cash.

Headquarters left Lisle, Illinois, for a smaller office at 358 Hall Avenue in Wallingford.

By 1991 the firm still carried 373 million dollars of debt against 19.5 million dollars of equity, a ratio the Wall Street Journal recorded that year.

On 8 November 1991 Amphenol returned to the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker APH. The offering was part of a recapitalization after two delayed attempts that August.

The mechanism is a connector maker using a public listing to refinance an LBO book, not to invent a product. The phenolic socket was already six decades old.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange. The Wallingford plant is a working headquarters and is photographed only from public pavement.

Photo: Arild Vågen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.