But with a $20,000m tender offer to make a leveraged buyout for foods-to-tobaccos giant RJR Nabisco Inc arriving on Monday, why not one for IBM? Apart from the fact that for a sighting shot, you’d have to come up with at least $100,000,000m, one overriding reason is that it is a highly integrated company, and it would not be easy to break it up, although a strong case could be made for bits of the company, like the personal computer business, performing a lot better if they had the deadweight of having to meet the demands of the nominally departed but in fact very much alive and kicking Data Processing Division; the AS/400 could do a lot better if the same company wasn’t trying to sell 9370s into many of the same markets; but ultimately, if anyone were to try to break the company up, they would find that it is much more tightly integrated than it was only five years ago, and that the sum of the parts turned out to be worth little more than the whole.
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