Producer
Kennametal Inc.
US tungsten-carbide tooling and wear-component maker (cutting tools, mining bits, wear parts).
3
Inputs supplied
3
Goods downstream
0
Facilities
0
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3 inputs Kennametal Inc. supplies
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Metal Cutting (KC)
55%Infrastructure (KI) — Mining & Industrial Wear
38%Additive & Advanced Materials
7%
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Did you know2024
The road planing picks that Kennametal's Infrastructure division manufactures for highway milling machines — the drum-mounted carbide-tipped tools that grind asphalt from road surfaces during resurfacing — use the same tungsten carbide chemistry and cutter geometry as the mine drilling picks used to extract coal from underground seams. Both applications involve a tungsten carbide insert in a steel body that cuts/fractures hard material at speed. During the rare scenario where both road infrastructure maintenance spending and coal mining simultaneously contract (as occurred in 2015-2016 when low oil prices depressed energy extraction and tight municipal budgets deferred road maintenance), Kennametal's Infrastructure segment faces simultaneous demand weakness in mining and road maintenance — two industries with apparently unrelated economic drivers that share an identical consumable supply chain in WC-Co cutting bits.
Kennametal Inc. ↗Origin2024
Kennametal was founded in 1938 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania by Philip McKenna, a 31-year-old metallurgist who had developed a superior tungsten carbide cutting tool formulation. McKenna licensed the technology from KRUPP (Germany) but reformulated it, producing a cemented carbide cutting tool that outperformed existing options for high-speed steel machining. He founded the company in a barn in Latrobe and sold his first tools to the steel mills of Pittsburgh's industrial corridor. When the US entered World War II, Kennametal's tungsten carbide cutting tools became critical to the wartime industrial production surge — carbide tools cut faster than high-speed steel, increasing the throughput of defense manufacturing machining operations. The US government classified Kennametal's carbide formulations as strategic materials during WWII. The company that started in a Latrobe barn grew into the US's leading carbide toolmaker specifically because its founder's metallurgical insight matched the needs of wartime mass production.
Kennametal Inc. ↗