He sells plants to go.

• Position: John DuMond's business of selling machinery of closed manufacturing plants

John DuMond calls it instant industrialization. His critics call it selling off U.S. manufacturing might.

Whatever you call it, his business is peddling idle manufacturing-plant equipment, much of it to Third World nations, and there's no problem with supply.

"I've found a niche, you could say," chirps the 68-year-old Toledo, Ohio, native. He moved DuMond Co. to Charlotte's milder climate five years ago after heart-bypass surgery in Chicago, where he lived and worked for 34 years.

His credentials for brokering yesterday's plants to today's would-be industrial powers? "I've been in sales all my life," says DuMond, who was assistant sales manager for Illinois Cereal Mills in Paris, Ill., in 1958 when he did his first deal -- a Sanford charcoal-briquette factory that he found out about because corn flour is used as a binder in fashioning briquettes.

Since then, DuMond has shipped factories, priced from $100,000 to $2.5 million, to 12 countries, including Malaysia, Australia and Canada. Most, though, go to the Caribbean and Latin America. U.S. clients -- buyers and sellers alike -- include Beatrice Foods, Cargill, General Foods and General Mills.

The University of Toledo business graduate and his wife, Kaye, are quite literally DuMond and company. If they need engineers, mechanics or...