Word: largest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...build cars. Added Smith at a news conference: "Electronics, we believe, is going to be the key to the 21st century." Products manufactured by Hughes, which no longer makes aircraft, range from microchips and lasers to communications satellites and air-to-air missiles. The California company is the largest supplier of electronic equipment to the military, and the seventh biggest defense contractor...
...directed a far-reaching corporate reorganization and has been snapping up high-tech companies that make everything from industrial robots to computer software for artificial intelligence. Prior to last week's agreement, GM's boldest acquisition was the $2.55 billion 1984 purchase of Electronic Data Systems, the world's largest data-processing firm...
After returning to Austria last week to resume meetings with GM's European board of advisers, Smith discussed his corporate strategy in an interview with TIME Correspondent William McWhirter in Salzburg. Said Smith: "The U.S. is going through the largest technological revolution in its history, and we're going to be standing right in the middle of it. Our game plan was to have E.D.S., Hughes and GM as the natural base for both growth and diversity. We are now being viewed as a high-tech company, not a medium-tech, mass- production...
...storehouse of technology," he says. "Hughes' single biggest asset is its brainpower and teamwork." But Hughes coveted its independence and initially spurned GM. The rebuff turned the automaker toward Electronic Data Systems, a Dallas-based computer-services firm that Founder H. Ross Perot had built into the largest company in its field. Smith sees E.D.S. as the key to upgrading GM's worldwide computing operations. Under the Texas firm's guidance, GM machines performing tasks as varied as running payrolls and controlling robots will be forged into a unified network. As a first step, GM made...
...Wall Street firm of Morgan Stanley to handle the auction. "The Russians would have been happy to make the highest bid," quipped Joseph Perella, a managing director of First Boston, a Hughes adviser. From the outset, GM seemed the most likely buyer. Detroit's recovery had left the largest U.S. automaker with some $9 billion to spend, even after the E.D.S. acquisition, and Smith badly wanted Hughes...