In 1997, manufacturing expanded with production at its Shanghai plant. Over a 10-year period, the company acquired 25 companies in Europe, North America, and Asia. Dick Haworth developed a lengthy process of getting to know possible acquisition targets. He explained his system in an article he authored for the January/February 1995 Mergers & Acquisitions magazine, detailing how his firm sometimes worked for five or six years with companies it hoped to buy, moving cautiously toward formal acquisition talks. For Haworth, the long period of getting to know the target company paid off.