NYSE RTI will ring opening bell

By CYNTHIA VINARSKY
VINDICATOR BUSINESS WRITER
WEATHERSFIELD -- Members of RTI International Metals board will be in New York City on Friday to sound the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange, kicking off the company's annual meeting, its first in the Big Apple.
The bell-ringing, a Wall Street tradition to mark important business events, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of RTI's largest subsidiary, RMI Titanium.
Some business-news television stations, such as CNBC, televise the ringing of the opening bell daily at 9 a.m.
RTI's annual meeting will follow at 2 p.m. at the New York Marriott Financial Center in lower Manhattan.
Other reasons: Richard Leone, director of investor relations and marketing for RTI, said ringing the opening bell was just one of the reasons the Weathersfield-based company decided to have its meeting in New York instead of locally.
Officials also wanted to give some of its institutional investors an opportunity to meet the board of directors and executive officers.
About 77 percent of the company's 20.8 million shares of stock are owned by institutional investors, some of which are based in New York.
"They're spread across the country, from New York to Boston to San Francisco and everywhere in between," Leone said, "but we get to see very few of them when we have our annual meetings in Niles or Youngstown. We thought this would make it easier for some to attend."
Local complaints: He said officials received only a few complaints from local shareholders when word got out that its annual meeting would be out of town for the first time in the company's history, and most understood the reasons behind the move.
It's too soon to say where future meetings will be, he said.
RTI doesn't have access to information tracking how many of its shareholders live in the Mahoning Valley.
A 13-member panel made up of the company's board members and executive officers owns 635,369 shares, about 3 percent.
Developments in 2000 likely to be reported at Friday's meeting include RTI's purchase in December of Reamet, a French distributor of titanium products.
RTI had been a part-owner of the company since 1992, and Leone said the purchase won't change things much initially.
"We think it's just a very good place to be strategically," he said, noting that Reamet's largest customer is Aerospatiale, the French partner to the Airbus consortium and a major user of titanium in its new aircraft.
Largest customer: Boeing Co. has been RMI's largest titanium customer in the past, but Leone said Airbus has been increasing its orders and beat out Boeing in 2000.
The European aircraft maker is expected to expand its use of titanium even more, he said, with its plans to produce a new super jumbo jet designed with a high titanium content.
RTI's annual report, just released this week, includes a profile of RMI, which was founded as Mallory-Sharon Titanium Corp. in 1951. Located on Warren Avenue just outside Niles, the plant employs 521.
Supplier award: Company officials said RMI was selected by Boeing Commercial Airplanes Group to receive its Q100 Supplier Award as one of the aircraft maker's top 100 suppliers, the only titanium mill product company to receive the award.
RTI's two divisions, the titanium group and the fabrication and distribution group, employ 1,200 at 17 locations in the U.S. and Europe.