Astec Industries, Inc. designs, engineers, manufactures, and markets equipment and components used primarily in road building and related construction activities, as well as other products. The company's products are used in each phase of road building, from quarrying and crushing the aggregate to application of the road surface. It also manufactures certain equipment and components unrelated to road construction, including equipment for the mining, quarrying, construction, and demolition industries; gas and oil drilling rigs; water well and geothermal drilling rigs; industrial heat transfer equipment; whole-tree pulpwood chippers; horizontal grinders; and blower trucks. The company also manufactures a line of multiple use plants for cement treated base, roller compacted concrete and ready-mix concrete. It is developing and marketing pelletizing equipment used to compress wood and other products into dense pellets for the renewable energy market among other applications. In addition to equipment sales, the company manufactures and sells replacement parts for equipment in each of its product lines and replacement parts for some competitors' equipment. The distribution and sale of replacement parts is an integral part of the company's business. Segments The company operates through four segments: Asphalt Group, Aggregate and Mining Group, Mobile Asphalt Paving Group, and Underground Group. ASPHALT GROUP This segment is made up of three business units, such as Astec, Inc. (Astec); Heatec, Inc. (Heatec); and CEI Enterprises, Inc. (CEI). These business units design, engineer, manufacture, and market a line of asphalt plants, concrete mixing plants, wood pellet plants, and related components of each, heating and heat transfer processing equipment and storage tanks for the asphalt paving and other non-related industries. Products The company designs, engineers, manufactures, and markets a line of portable, stationary and relocatable hot-mix asphalt plants and related components under the ASTEC trademark, as well as a line of concrete mixing plants. An asphalt mixing plant consists of heating and storage equipment for liquid asphalt (manufactured by CEI or Heatec); cold feed bins for blending aggregates; a counter-flow continuous type unit (Astec Double Barrel) for drying, heating, and mixing; a baghouse consisted of air filters and other pollution control devices; hot storage bins or silos for temporary storage of hot-mix asphalt; and a control house. Its generation of portable asphalt plants is marketed as the Six Pack and consists of six or more portable components, which could be disassembled, moved to the construction site and reassembled. The company’s improved version of the Six Pack, known as the Turbo Six Pack, is a portable plant, which is useful in less populated areas where plants must be moved from job-to-job and could be disassembled and erected without the use of cranes. The company developed a Double Barrel Green System (patent pending), which allows the asphalt mix to be prepared and placed at lower temperatures than conventional systems and operates with a reduction in smoke emissions during paving and load-out. The company’s new Astec multi-nozzle device eliminates the need for the expensive additives by mixing a small amount of water and asphalt cement together to create microscopic bubbles that reduce the viscosity of the asphalt mix coating on the rock, thereby allowing the mix to be handled and worked at lower temperatures. The components in the company’s asphalt mixing plants are automated and use both microprocessor-based and programmable logic control systems for operation. The plants are manufactured to meet or exceed federal and state clean air standards. The company also builds batch type asphalt plants and has developed specialized asphalt recycling equipment for use with its hot-mix asphalt plants. The company’s concrete production equipment is designed to operate and maintain. Materials are managed with blending using belt scales and variable frequency conveyor drives. Shaft-driven mixers with high-torque folding action deliver a uniform concrete mix. Its tower plan