Yes. They are owned by the Hong Kong company Techtronic Industries, which also owns Homelite, Hart, Oreck, Dirt Devil, and a few others. Ryobi Power Tools and Ryobi Outdoor Equipment are also Techtronic Industries brands, under license from Ryobi.
Techtronic Industries bought them from the Swedish company Atlas Copco in 2005.
Here's an article on who owns what in power tools [1].
With some of the licensing deals, the same brand might actually come from two different companies. Emerson owns RIDGID and makes tools under that name, but also licenses the name to Techtronic. Emerson seems to make the non-powered RIDGID tools and Techtronic makes the powered ones.
It looks like maybe 6 companies cover pretty much every power tool brand that most people in the US are likely to find at Home Depot, Lowe's, ACE, Walmart, and so on.
I just wish that they would get together and agree on battery standards for their cordless power tools, so that batteries could be interchanged.
My first lithium battery cordless tool was a bundle from Black & Decker of a weed whacker and a hedge trimer. Since then I've added a B&D drill and a B&D impact driver. I now need a cordless leaf blower and although it looks like some other brands would fit my needs better than B&D I'll probably go with B&D just to avoid getting another battery system (and will probably by the tool only since I have enough B&D batteries and chargers already--I don't use enough tools simultaneously to need more than the three batteries and charges I already have).
There are some adapters to allow mixing batteries, for example this one allows using Black & Decker 20V batteries on Bosch 18V tools [2], so it might be feasible to branch out from B&D without having to deal with a different battery system.
> There are some adapters to allow mixing batteries, for example this one allows using Black & Decker 20V batteries on Bosch 18V tools
DeWalt, Craftsman, Porter Cable, Black and Decker, and probably another brand or two that I can't recall at the moment all use very close to the same batteries. The pins are in a different order and there's small plastic tabs in certain places so you can't swap brands but with a little bit of work you can charge a Craftsman battery in a Porter Cable charger and use it to power a DeWalt drill. Don't attempt to modify these batteries and chargers unless you have an understanding about what you're doing, though.
> [German] Chairman Horst J. Pudwill, a former Volkswagen executive ... co-founded the company in 1985 as a maker of rechargeable battery packs for cordless tools. It then made tools for do-it-yourselfers on a contract basis for Sears Holdings Corp.'s (SHLD ) Craftsman brand, among others. Then it bought control of brands, including rights to the Ryobi name outside Japan, Royal vacuum cleaners, and Homelite garden tools. The big move was the $626 million purchase of Milwaukee Electric Tool and Germany's AEG Power Tools -- both premier brands used by professionals -- from Atlas Copco.
> Techtronic can also take new tools from the conceptual stage to production in as little as six months, thanks to 24/7 collaboration among designers in Asia and Techtronic's "concept centers" in Hong Kong, South Carolina, Germany, and Britain.
