Visant Corp. of Armonk this week announced its second plant closing as the marketing and publishing company and seller of Jostens brand class rings continues to reorganize.
“The reality is we want to be as efficient with our manufacturing capacity as we can be,” Vice President of Finance Paul B. Carousso said. “We just feel this is the way to go.”
Visant said it will close its Lehigh Press Inc. plant in Pennsauken, N.J. by the end of August, idling 206 workers. Operations at the plant will be moved to other plants around the country, including one in Hagerstown, Md. that was part of Visant’s $219 million acquisition of Phoenix Color Corp. in the spring.
Severance is being negotiated with the workers’ union. Visant also closed a plant in Attleboro, Mass. that produced Jostens rings, and transferred production to a Texas plant. The company recorded $600,000 in restructuring charges for the first quarter in connection with the closing, which idled 23 workers.
Visant employs 6,000 in the United States. It reported net income for 2007 of $188.9 million on net sales of $1.27 billion.

Billionaire Warren Buffett is scheduled to visit Mount Vernon tomorrow, dropping in on the former Michael Anthony Jewelers that, through a chain of acquisitions in recent years, is now owned by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
Buffett will do a ribbon-cutting with Mayor Clinton D. Young at the business, now called Richline Group, at South MacQuesten Parkway, said Mark Hanna, Richline’s chief marketing officer. Buffett will later tour the facility, chat with a few employees, and pose for some pictures, Hanna said.
“Everybody is very, very psyched up about it,” Hanna said. The office employs more than 300.
Publicly-held Michael Anthony Jewelers was acquired in 2005 by Bel-Oro International, a Manhattan-based distributor of fine jewelry. Last year Berkshire Hathaway bought Bel-Oro and another jewelry company, Aurafin LLC, and combined them into Richline Group.
Hanna said the Mount Vernon office is the Northeast headquarters for Richline, which also has administrative offices in Tamarac, Fla. Anthony Paolercio, formerly co-chairman and chief executive at Michael Anthony, is now executive vice president of manufacturing and works out of the Mount Vernon office.
Manufacturing that was done in Mount Vernon is now done overseas, Hanna said.
Buffett is Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman and chief executive.

Progenics Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Eastview said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Dr. Alton B. Kremer, its senior vice president of clinical research, had resigned on May 20 to pursue other interests.
Kremer had joined the company in October 2004. Last year he was paid $380,000 in salary and a $245,000 bonus, among other compensation, according to Progenics’ proxy statement.

Stewart EFI will close its longstanding manufacturing operation in Yonkers by year’s end, but not from lack of interest by the city’s Industrial Development Agency.
The business, known in Yonkers for decades as Stewart Stamping, produces precision metal parts for a variety of industries. It was a division of Insilco when it was stuck in bankruptcy five years ago.
At the time, the IDA provided a host of economic incentives to a management group that wanted to buy the Stewart assets, IDA spokeswoman Colleen Roche said. They included a $54,000 mortgage recording tax exemption and a sales tax exemption.
The plant on Central Park Avenue was taken off the tax rolls as part of the deal, but Stewart has made payments that were equal to the taxes owed since the deal was completed in 2003, Roche said. The company also never used the sales tax exemption to which it was entitled, she added.
A clause in the deal would allow for a recapture of any real property tax breaks if employment at the plant fell below 150. The recapture was moot because the company didn’t get property tax savings, and employment remained above 150 annually, Roche said. The recapture didn’t apply to the mortgage tax.
The IDA Web site valued the project with Stewart at $10 million. Roche said the figure represents the amount of investment put into the project; in this case, it included the acquisition of the site and improvements made to building, including new equipment.
Stewart EFI is based in Thomaston, Conn. Company officials have not commented in detail on why the Yonkers plant is closing. A member of Teamsters Local 210 said it had been told that the operation was too expensive.

At its annual meeting of shareholders in Tarrytown today, ITT Corp. reiterated it expects to earn $4 to $4.10 a share in 2008 on revenues of about $11.5 billion.

In other business, shareholders re-elected nine of 10 board members on its board of directors, the Harrison-based defense contractor said.

Raymond LeBoeuf, an ITT director since 2000, is retiring from the board and didn’t stand for re-election.

Shareholders also approved Deloitte & Touche LLP as the company’s independent auditor, ITT said.

In afternoon trading, shares of the company were down a fraction to $66.43 a share.