MacDermid, Incorporated Employees’ Pension Plan

MacDermid, Incorporated Employees’ Pension Plan

The MacDermid, Incorporated Employees’ Pension Plan is a single-sponsor defined-benefit plan based in Waterbury, Connecticut, serving current and former employees of the specialty-chemicals firm. The plan sponsor, MacDermid, Incorporated, was acquired in 2013 by what is now Element Solutions Inc (NYSE: ESI), but the pension plan maintains a separate fiduciary and investment structure. Daniel H. Leever, MacDermid’s former CEO and Chairman who led the company for decades before the acquisition, is associated with the plan’s oversight lineage. The plan's investment strategy stands out among corporate peers for its commitment to venture capital. It allocates across the full lifecycle—from seed and start-up to expansion and late-stage venture—suggesting a decades-long program of fund commitments rather than a one-time opportunistic allocation. On the public-markets side, the plan holds corporate bond mutual funds and cash equivalents, providing the liquidity backstop that makes the venture allocation feasible. The plan also owns a stake in United Kingdom commercial real estate via pooled funds, adding a hard-asset, income-producing layer to the portfolio. This tripartite structure—venture for growth, fixed income for liability matching, and UK real estate for yield—is unusual for a corporate plan of this likely scale. The plan is administered by Debbie Vigeant and operates alongside a related defined-contribution vehicle, the MacDermid, Incorporated Profit Sharing and Employee Savings Plan, which serves active employees with a 401(k)-style structure. The pension plan’s exact funded status, total asset pool, and number of participants are not publicly reported in a readily accessible format, which is common for private-sub-company plans that file limited regulatory disclosures. Structurally, the plan’s most distinctive feature is its willingness to back early-stage venture funds—an allocation that demands long-duration thinking and tolerance for illiquidity, traits more commonly associated with endowments than with single-sponsor corporate pensions. This posture likely reflects a board-level conviction, shaped during the Leever era, that internal rates of return from venture can outstrip the plan’s actuarial discount rate over full market cycles.