Obituary: Jeffrey Steiner

John Wolz

Jeffrey J. Steiner, chairman and CEO of the Fairchild Corporation from 1985 through September 2008, died in November at age 71.

Steiner was CEO of both Banner Aerospace and aerospace fastener manufacturer Fairchild when the companies merged in 1998. Alcoa acquired Fairchild in 2002 and combined it with Huck Fasteners to form Alcoa Fastening Systems.

Steiner had assumed control of aerospace fastener distributor Banner Aerospace Inc. in the mid-1980s.

As a child during World War II, Steiner had fled his native Austria with his Jewish father and Turkish mother and was raised in Istanbul. He received a degree in textile engineering from Britain’s Bradford Institute of Technology. Steiner planned to work in the U.S. for one year, but as a young sales trainee at Texas Instruments he advanced quickly to become president of subsidiaries in France, Mexico and Switzerland and was on the corporation’s management committee by age 25. After 10 years with Texas Instruments, Steiner founded Cedec S.A. in Paris, an engineering firm focusing on the European energy market.
In 1981 he returned to the U.S. and in 1985 became CEO of Banner.

“The big time for Mr. Steiner came when he bought into Banner Industries as an investment vehicle, after Banner’s chairman had suffered his third heart attack and was looking for someone to replace him,” according a 1989 New York Times profile of Steiner. “Using his own money and bank borrowings, in 1985 Mr. Steiner purchased a 20% stake in Banner for $15 million and became its chief executive.”

By the late 1990s, Fairchild’s shareholding in Banner Aerospace had risen to 85% and Steiner was CEO and chairman of both.

At Banner, Steiner acquired aircraft equipment supplier Solair Inc. and Rexnord Automation a manufacturer of aerospace fasteners, oil pipeline and refining equipment and water pollution control systems. Acquisitions growth put Banner on Fortune magazine’s 25 fastest-growing companies list. Over the years Banner acquisitions also included fastener distributors Harco Inc. and P.B. Herndon Company.

Steiner viewed the aerospace fastener business as the right industry, as aging planes were making more flights.

A 1989 New York Times headline labeled Steiner as a “Globe-Trotting Takeover Artist,” who was “Transforming Nuts and Bolts Into Big-Time Deals.” Steiner was described in the article as a “man who has used his international perspective and a nose for opportunity to profit from three business waves over the past two decades” and was “a member in good standing of a circle that includes Mr. (Carl) Icahn, now chairman of Trans World Airlines Inc., and Mr. (corporate raider Nelson) Peltz, former head of Triangle Industries.

“I’ve long had a goal of building a company in a specific core business and becoming No. 1 or No. 2 in that, and now I’m close to achieving it,’ Steiner told the Times.

NYT reporter Leslie Wayne described Steiner as a “dapper chain-smoker who dresses in the European tradition of sports jackets instead of suits and whose New York office is decorated with Andy Warhol portraits of some of his children.” �2008/9 FastenerNews.com