Last month’s hot tip suitor for Xerox, Unisys Corp, has now entered the lists at Honeywell Inc – well if the Unisys brass was in Minneapolis looking Control Data Corp over, might as well drop in on Honeywell while they’re about it, but despite a $3.125 leap in the share price to $66.25 on gossip that Unisys was about to declare a notifiable holding, the combination wouldn’t seem to make very much sense: a substantial part of Honeywell’s defence business was sold to it by Unisys, and its other operations home and building controls, industrial controls – don’t make a very good fit with Unisys, since the latter two activities would not open up a big new market for Unisys computers (Xerox on the other hand has an enormous base of copier users who might be persuaded to buy computers from Unisys); Kidder Peabody analyst Michael Lauer reckons that against that $66 price in the market, the break-up value of Honeywell might be as much as $150 a share – $50 for building controls, $25 to $30 for industrial controls, $80 for aerospace and defence and $15 a share for Honeywell Yamatake.
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