Acquisitions company sold

Hoechst transformed its business from a hybrid chemical company into a pure Hfe science company by radically divesting over 80 percent of its portfolio, getting rid of businesses such as specialty chemicals (sold to Clariant) or chemical intermediates (spun off into Celanese). It completed the acquisition of Roussel-Uclaf and bought Marion MerreU Dow, and finally merged with the French life science company Rhone-Poulenc after the latter had also spun off aU its chemical business as Rhodia. By reinventing" itself under the brand name Aventis, it increased its Return on Sales (ROS) from 4.6 percent to 12.4 percent, a development that has recently been viewed very favorably by capital markets. 

Vendor qualification is relatively easy if the software or computer system is sold in the same configuration to multiple users. Typical examples are computer systems for analytical instrument control, data acquisition and data evaluation. In this case there is much information available on the quality of the product and on the vendor s behavior in case of problems. This information may be available within the user s firm based on experience of previous versions within the same department or the newly purchased version in other departments. Information can also be gleaned from colleages in other companies. If such information is available, only a little additional information need be collected from the vendor. This can include questions like... 

Exxon, Arco, Amoco, Mobil, and Ashland also entered the mining of copper and other industrial minerals. For Mobil and Exxon, the latter included uranium. By 1993, however, these units had been spun off. A few firms strayed even further afield. Exxon and Arco undertook the production of computer products and provided computer services. Exxon even went so far as to acquire an innovative electric-motor enterprise. Reliance Electric. As mentioned above, Mobil purchased Montgomery Ward and the Container Corporation of America, while Occidental bought Iowa Beef, the nation s most successful meat packer. By the mid-1990s, however, the petroleum companies had sold off nearly all these acquisitions. By then, nearly all American industrial corporations had learned that such unrelated diversification could rarely remain profitable for more than a decade and defined their strategic boundaries accordingly. 

The top managers at SmithKline possessed little understanding of the technological capabilities and needs of their acquisitions. Unlike the leaders at Abbott, they were not forced to learn by saving a business in crisis. In 1984 they sensibly sold off Beckman s industrial products for 165 million in cash to General Electric. But the output, quality, and profits from Beckman s instruments and the ophthalmic devices it had acquired continued to decline. By 1988 Arnold Beckman was publicly regretting the disintegration of his former company s capabilities. 

Industries set their own standards for certifying their products based on procedures and requirements in ISO, CIE, ASTM, and other national and international standards. Companies buy physical standards from optical supply houses (64) or SRMs from national laboratories to calibrate their spectrophotometers. Optics filters are sold with certificates certifying their spectral properties. Certificates from national standardizing laboratories hold the highest credibility and are based on international round-robin comparisons (65, 66). Standards from optical supply companies are often identical in material, shape, and size to SRMs from national laboratories. These standards are certified by instruments calibrated using national laboratory standards. The added uncertainty introduced by the second measuring instrument lowers the certified spectral credibility, value, and acquisition time. Usually, if traceability from a company s standards to the... 

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