Word: ge
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hilton hotel in Brussels and wrestled with an unfamiliar feeling--one of impending defeat. Just eight months before, he had, it seemed, pulled off a stunning coup. Welch had always coveted Honeywell International, whose business making advanced electronics for the aviation industry, he thought, made a perfect fit with GE, one of three leading global manufacturers of airplane engines. In October 2000, during a visit to the New York Stock Exchange, he had learned that United Technologies Corp.--whose Pratt & Whitney division is another huge enginemaker--planned to buy Honeywell. Within 45 minutes, on the phone from his car, Welch...
...European capital, his last big deal was falling apart. On that day in June, Welch had met twice with Mario Monti, the European Union's Commissioner for Competition. Monti believed that the combination of Honeywell's cockpit controls with GE's engines and powerful aircraft financing division would stifle competition. In other words, he viewed with suspicion precisely those synergies that, for Welch, made the deal so attractive. Monti would approve the merger only if Welch made the kind of concessions that, from GE's standpoint, wrecked its whole point. The next morning Monti called Welch once more, to discuss...
Welch placed a call to Andrew Card, chief of staff to President Bush, who was about to sit down with European leaders in Goteborg, Sweden. As the GE boss recounted the conversation to TIME, he told Card that he would appreciate "whatever help you can give us." In the formal meetings in Sweden, GE never came up. But on June 15, in Warsaw, Bush said he was "concerned" that the Europeans had rejected the merger. Monti was furious--not with Bush, he told TIME, but with those who had sought the President's help. Three days later Monti said...
...What all that means for the U.S., from Washington to Wall Street, is that in globalized antitrust regulation the higher bar is the only bar. A merger of Connecticut-based GE and New Jersey-based Honeywell qualified for Euro-scrutiny because the combined revenues of the two companies exceed the EU's circuit-breakers of $4.3 billion in global sales and $215 million in EU sales...
...GE-Honeywell qualified by a country mile, and so will a lot of other U.S. mergers. E.U. and U.S. antitrust officials work closely together, and for most of the '90s, if American companies could get a deal past their own government, they could get it past the EU. (The last big merger spiked by the EU, WorldCom-Sprint, was denied by the U.S. a day later.) Now, Bush's hands may be off the gates, but Monti's are still on. Which suddenly makes Europe a very imposing gatekeeper...