Eaton Corp. announced a 7% year-over-year increase in sales for the fourth quarter of 2012. The company’s net income for the quarter was $179m, or $0.46 per share – down more than 50% due to charges associated with integration of Cooper Industries, an Irish electrical-equipment manufacturer Eaton bought for US$12.6bn in May 2012, the company said.

The company’s fourth-quarter revenue was $4.3bn, and its full-year 2012 revenue was $16.3bn – 2% up from 2011. Eaton’s stock went up 0.39% following the company’s announcement of the results, valued at $59.60 per share in afterhours trading.

“We closed the acquisition of Cooper at the end of November and are off to a great start on the integration of Cooper into Eaton,” Eaton chairman and CEO Alexander Cutler, said. “As we had previously communicated, the closing of the Cooper transaction resulted in several unusual financial impacts to our fourth-quarter results.”

The Cooper-related charges included $152m of transaction costs, which impacted fourth-quarter results, and $24m in acquisition-integration charges, he explained. At the same time, the deal has offset what would otherwise be negative sales growth in the fourth quarter.

“Sales growth in the fourth quarter of 7% consisted of a decline of 6% in core sales and a reduction of 1% from foreign exchange, offset by an increase of 14% from acquisitions,” Cutler said. “Of the 14% sales growth from acquisitions, Cooper represented 12%.”

He attributed the thin increase in full-year sales to uncertain economic conditions. While weak economy in all major regions had impacted the company’s revenue growth, the Cooper acquisition will still mark 2012 in the company’s history as a year of “immense transformation,” the CEO said.

Eaton expects its revenue to grow about 42% in 2013. It estimates that cumulatively the acquisitions it completed last year will add $6bn of revenue.

While data centers are a major market for Eaton, the company does not report the revenue it generates in this space separately.

Darrick Finan, Eaton’s VP of sales for the Americas, said the company considers sales of electrical equipment for IT deployments above 100kVA each to be data center sales. Within this 100kVA-plus market, he estimates Eaton to have about a quarter of global market share.

New HQ in Ireland, no impact on US ops
As part of the acquisition of Cooper, Eaton, originally a Cleveland, Ohio-based company, incorporated in Ireland. According to Finan, while the company’s official headquarters is now in Ireland, there has been no impact on its US operations.

“We’ll still have a headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio,” he said. “We’ll still have our power-quality headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, so it really has no impact on the day-to-day operations of our business.”

Mark Horner, Eaton’s senior manager of global communications, explained that incorporation in Ireland had to do with Irish law, since that is where Cooper was headquartered. The move “has to do with very complex international laws related to the acquisition,” he said.