Word: bendix
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Coming soon . . . the blockbuster business epic of the year! See corporate giants devour one another in titanic clashes. See captains of industry race against midnight deadlines to save their power and prestige. Will Bill Agee of Bendix Corp. and his beautiful blond bride Mary escape the clutches of Martin Marietta Corp.'s menacing Tom Pownall? Will tough old Harry Gray of United Technologies foil their plans to find happiness in the embrace of Ed Hennessy of Allied Corp.? Find out in Takeover, the drama that asks the question: "Is this any way to run a company...
Just why mega-companies like Bendix insist on embarking on such excursions of sound and fury that, of course, signify nothing comprises a small mystery. Clearly, diminished federal regulation plays a part. Yet in the case of Bendix, Agee must have known that his gamble would meet with strong resistance--from Marietta...
...intervention of Allied Corp. did disentangle the mess a bit, but for Bendix and Marietta the end of the match marked a pyrrhic victory at best. Agee's Bendix had become somebody else's property, and Marietta had lost a month's time and resources while surrendering much of its stock to third parties. The only winners, it seems, were the speculators fortunate enough to have their transactions fall on the right side of the two companies' stock caprices...
...other reasons usually proffered for takeovers don't wash here. Marietta wasn't yearning to be rescued from collapse--far from it. A Bendix-Marietta pairing apparently wouldn't have made for "stronger competition" or yielded "substantial economic efficiencies," as the skeptical Times observed. If anything, last month's corporate jockeying and the diverting effect it had on the stock market and the companies involved was downright inefficient...
...wake of last week's denouement, daily newspapers across the country editorialized that Bendix's shakedown cruise pointed up the need for stricter federal regulation. Undoubtedly true, but the recommendation is unrealistic in the Age of Reagan. More practically, the unseemly Bendix affair should provoke a little reassessment on the part of American industry, a realization that "mass merger" is equivalent to corporate suicide Last month's theatrics show that today's mergers often have nothing to do with efficiency and productivity. They stem, instead, from a sense of institutional machismo that craves acquisition. America's business giants have...