I was a gradeschool student in the nineties, and I just want to close the loop for you.
All of us young people knew those bendy, half-plastic, scratchy-lead pencils were trash. (The graphite would even break inside the barrel). They were barely fit to play the role of tinkertoys.
I hope the PE firm did something magnanimous with the money it saved.
Their next gen process was a fully automated continuous process co-extruder that extruded a core of hot graphite surrounded by a cellulose/wood mixture. That continuous string of graphite/wood composite was pulled down a two hundred foot line where it was cooled, sealed, painted twice, varnished, cut, capped with erasers and boxed. The whole line could be operated with two people.