• COVER STORY: BONNEY FORGE •
to operate with total quality performance, and to be a law-abiding corporate citizen that respects individuals and contributes to its communities.
Those are not aspirational words. They are a description of how the company actually operates. Leone maintains a regular presence in Mount Union, learning about employees’ lives and families in order to facilitate the kind of personal connection between leadership and workforce that no organizational chart can replicate. Bonney Forge employs more than 800 people. Each of them is treated as the foundation they are.
A few of the great employees who make Bonney Forge, Mount Union, truly exceptional.
A Family Business, Now in its Third Generation
Not every business acquisition becomes a family legacy. This one did. Leone ' s children and their spouses joined the company across different roles and geographies, drawn not by obligation but by the work itself and the culture surrounding it. Ownership has never left the family, and there are no plans for that to change.
Succession at Bonney Forge has been approached with the same long-term thinking that has defined everything else Leone has done. His daughter Sue Leone, Executive Vice President of WFI Operations in Houston, has spent decades building deep expertise across every dimension of the business, from manufacturing operations to international acquisitions to government negotiations.
Now, the third generation has begun to find its place inside the company, a development that speaks to what Leone has spent forty years quietly building: not just a business, but a legacy worth stepping into.
The company has received acquisition interest over the years. The answer has always been no. Leone has been consistent on this: the value of Bonney Forge lives in its people, its products, its relationships, and its reputation. Those things take generations to build. They are not transferable in a transaction.
150 Years, and the Work Continues
At 150 years, Bonney Forge is a company that has earned the right to celebrate. And it is celebrating. But it is doing so in character: by continuing to lead, to invest, to build, and to deliver. The Weldolet ® and Thredolet ® branch connections invented nearly a century ago remain the global standard for branch pipe connections, still exclusively Bonney Forge.
Bonney Forge Eco-Seal ® sets the bar for low-emission valve performance worldwide. The Critical Path program gets urgent product to customers who cannot afford to wait. Bonney Forge serves the oil and gas, petrochemical, power generation, chemical manufacturing, and general industrial piping industries across the globe, in environments where the standard is excellence and the margin for error is zero.
Bonney Forge is not done building, and neither is John Leone. Four decades in, the standard is higher than ever. The Leone family continues the charge, and the next chapter is already underway. •
A pressure-seal gate valve being hoisted into BFE’ s hydraulic testing system for final performance verification.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the profiled company and do not necessarily reflect the position of Valve World Americas.
Valve World Americas | May 2026 | www. valve-world-americas. com 9