Kennametal Inc. (KMT) featured company in The Wall Street Transcript

January 13, 2011

Frank P. Simpkins, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Kennametal Inc. (KMT), talked to The Wall Street Transcript about his company. Click here to read the complete interview.

TWST: Would you please give us a history of Kennametal and an overview of your operations?

Mr. Simpkins: Our company was founded in 1938 in Latrobe, Pa., by Philip McKenna, and there are basically two areas of the company. First is on the tooling product side, and what we do is manufacture products that deliver high productivity to our customers. For example, that would include custom and standards, regular product and the customized ones specific to a customer’s needs.

We have another area leveraging advanced material sciences and application knowledge focusing on wear-resistant solutions for use in very demanding or harsh environments. Our goal is really to concentrate on increasing our customers’ productivity, and the company serves everything from airframes to underground coal mining, engines, oil wells, turbochargers, construction, etc. So we serve a very diverse end-market mix. This year, we expect to do around $2.2 billion in sales for our fiscal year, and we are a June 30 year-end reporting company. To give you a little bit more, we have some 11,000 employees in our company, and we are in 60-plus different countries. At the end of last year, 53% of revenue came from outside of North America, which is a significant change in our portfolio over the past few years.