http://www.americanlafrance.com/interior.asp?n=22&p=4&s=22&a=124The hierarchy:
DaimlerChrysler Group (DCX) owns Freightliner, who makes the most popular heavy trucks in the US market. Until yesterday, Freightliner owned American LaFrance, the fifth-largest manufacturer of emergency vehicles--fire apparatus and ambulances.
Yesterday, DCX announced that they had finalized a deal to sell American LaFrance to the investment firm Patriarch Partners.
This is a weird transaction. Normally when you see things like this, the next thing you know all of the employees are out on the street. Not this time. On the face, it appears that the transaction was structured specifically to get American LaFrance out of DCX's Ladson, SC, facility so that DaimlerChrysler can build Sprinters there. (There are several American LaFrance factories.)
There's a slightly darker interpretation here. American LaFrance, as a manufacturer of emergency vehicles, sells almost exclusively to tax-funded entities. Large factories will have their own fire departments, and there are some privatized ambulance services that buy those vehicles, but for the most part their customers are, as Pigboy would put it, sucking on the public teat. Is it possible that DCX has no confidence in the ability of public entities to continue to buy emergency vehicles?