Myers Industries: A Tiny $30M Sale Wasn't a Fire Sale — It Finished a Real Cleanup

Myers Industries just sold the business it was built on — a tire-service distributor that dates to 1933 and generated $189 million of sales in the year before it was put up for sale — for $30 million. To a retail investor scanning the headline, that reads like a fire sale, the kind of number that usually signals a company dumping something it can't fix. Read the operating facts, and the opposite is closer to the truth: the $30 million is an honest price for a business the market was never valuing in the first place, and the sale is the finishing move on a cleanup that Myers' stock has been celebrating all year.

The deal announced August 31 sends Myers Tire Supply North America to Lion Equity Partners, a Denver private-equity firm that buys corporate castoffs, for $30 million before normal closing adjustments. Myers started the process a year earlier — it opened a strategic review in mid-2025 and began reporting the distributor as a discontinued operation in early 2026. The buyer even locked the parent out of the business for three years under a non-compete.

Why so little for two hundred million dollars of sales

The number that needs explaining is the gap between sales and price: roughly a fifth of Myers' total revenue sold for about one-sixth of a single year's sales, and for just 2.5% of the company's own $1.16 billion market value. The explanation hides in the margins the company publishes by segment.

Myers Tire Supply was the largest U.S. distributor of tools, equipment, and supplies for the tire, wheel, and under-vehicle service industry — a classic distribution trade, where revenue is high but the profit taken for moving goods is thin. In the second quarter of 2025 the unit lost half a million dollars on the operating line, and its adjusted EBITDA margin ran at roughly 4.8%. Compare that with Myers' material-handling manufacturing segment, which earned a 23.9% adjusted EBITDA margin in the same quarter. One business converts a fifth of its revenue to cash-flow profit; the other barely breaks even.

The market had effectively already decided what the distributor was worth. In the first quarter of 2026 Myers took a $14.3 million non-cash impairment on the unit, because the cash flows it could foresee from the business could no longer cover its book value. Nothing about the $30 million sale is a bargain being given away — it is the company finally booking the value the numbers had been signaling for years.

The real story is what Myers kept

The point of the sale was never the proceeds, which are small relative to the company — it was the clean-up. CEO Aaron Schapper has described the transaction as a defining step in a "Focused Transformation" that turns Myers from a company half-distributor, half-manufacturer into a pure engineered-resin-and-composite products house: ground-protection matting, material-handling containers, packaging, and military and fuel containers for infrastructure, industrial, consumer, food-and-beverage, and vehicle markets.

That retained business is the one growing. In the second quarter of 2026 revenue rose 9.8% year over year, adjusted EBITDA climbed 30.6%, and adjusted EPS jumped 60.6% to $0.53. The operating margin reached 16.7%, infrastructure sales were up 52% on utility and data-center demand, and food-and-beverage grew 48%. Free cash flow for the quarter was $26.5 million, and the sale proceeds push down leverage that had already fallen to about 1.9 times net debt to EBITDA. The company has now paid a dividend for 24 consecutive years, and the cash the sale frees up is meant to keep the balance sheet and the growth platforms funded.

The part that's worth the most scrutiny

Here is where the decision gets careful rather than excited. The stock trades near $31, up roughly 65% year to date and close to double its 52-week low — the market has already run these same facts. On trailing enterprise value to EBITDA of about 11 times and meaningful free cash flow, Myers isn't a blow-off bubble, but the re-rating that this sale completes has largely happened on the way to this announcement.

And the easy part of the story is now behind the company. Stripping out the distributor shrinks reported revenue by roughly a fifth on a like-for-like basis, so the growth Myers shows from here has to come from the remaining businesses rather than from a bigger number. Near term, management has already flagged two frictions: rising resin costs expected to pressure margins in the third quarter, and a moderation in the event-driven ground-protection demand that flattered the second quarter during the World Cup. The engineered-products portfolio can keep compounding only if it holds these margins while reported revenue optics shrink — that is the actual test of the next few quarters.

So the $30 million headline is best read not as cheap or as a red flag, but as a receipt: a low-margin distributor was never where the value lived, and what Myers is left with is the part that actually grows. The business has genuinely improved. Whether the stock still has room depends on the remaining portfolio proving it in the quarters ahead — at this price, new money is paying for that proof, not buying the transformation at a discount.