Unisys Corp is declining to comment on a resurgence of rumours that it is about to launch a bid for NCR Corp, but they were good for a $3.375 leap in the NCR share price to $64.125 on Monday: Unisys has a declared ambition to be a $20,000m company by the early 1990s and says that acquisitions will be necessary to meet that target; if it were to win NCR, it would expand turnover by about 50% to $15,000m or so, but might find that one and one made less than two because there is substantial overlap in Unix systems, communications processors and at the personal computer end of the market – and Unisys gets some of its Unix machines from NCR; NCR would be unlikely to go quietly, and most analysts were sceptical, saying that the $2,800m NCR would currently cost is too big a bite for Unisys so soon after its birth.
