Honeywell

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Honeywell International, Inc. <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;"></td></tr>
Type	Publically Traded
Founded	1906, 1999 by merger with AlliedSignal
Headquarters	Morristown, New Jersey <tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Products</th><td>Aerospace & Defense , Automation & Control Solutions , Specialty Materials</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Revenue</th><td>$25.601B USD (Image:Green Arrow Up.svg9.8% FY '03 to '04)</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Employees</th><td>116,000</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Website</th><td>www.honeywell.com</td></tr>

Image:Honeywellheating.jpg

Honeywell (NYSE: HON) is a major American multinational corporation that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations.

Honeywell is a Fortune 500 company with a workforce of over 100,000. The company is headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey. Its current chief executive officer is David M. Cote. Honeywell has many brands that consumers may recognize. Some of the most recognizable products are its line of home thermostats, particularly the iconic round type, and automotive products sold under the names of Prestone, Fram, and Autolite.

1 History
2 Corporate governance
3 Stock
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

In 1906, Mark C. Honeywell founded Honeywell Heating Specialty Co., Inc. in Wabash, Indiana. Honeywell's company merged with Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company in 1927. Minneapolis Heat Regulator's roots trace back to 1886. The merged company was called the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company. Honeywell was its first president, William R. Sweatt its first chairman.

[edit] James H. Binger

The son of a doctor, James H. Binger (1916–2004) grew up on Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended the Blake School, where he met his wife Virginia. He earned an economics degree from Yale University and a law degree from the University of Minnesota. On graduation, he joined Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney, where a client was Honeywell.

In 1943 he joined Honeywell, and became its president in 1961 and its chairman in 1965. On becoming Chairman of Honeywell, Binger revamped the company sales approach, placing emphasis on profits rather than on volume. He also stepped up the company's international expansion — it had six plants producing 12% of the companies revenue. He also officially changed the company's corporate name from Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. to Honeywell.<ref>http://time-proxy.yaga.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,940743,00.html</ref>

From the 1950s until the mid-1970s, Honeywell was the United States importer of Pentax cameras and photographic equipment. These products were labeled in the U.S. Honeywell Pentax.

Under Binger's stewardship from 1961 to 1978 he expanded the company into such fields as defense, aerospace, computers and cameras. Honeywell originally entered the computer business via a joint venture with Raytheon called Datamatic Corp., but soon bought out Raytheon's share and the business became a Honeywell division. It also purchased minicomputer pioneer Computer Control Corporation, renaming it as Honeywell's Computer Control Division. Through most of the 1960s, Honeywell was one of the "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" of computing. IBM was "Snow White," while the dwarfs, in addition to Honeywell, included Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, GE, NCR, RCA, and Univac.

In 1970, Honeywell bought General Electric's computer division. The company was reorganized into two operating units: Honeywell Information Systems, headed by President Clarence (Clancy) Spangle and Honeywell entered the defense industry in World War II, at first producing aerospace elements. During and after the Vietnam Era, Honeywell's defense division produced a number of products, including cluster bombs, missile guidance systems, napalm and land mines. The Honeywell project, founded in 1968, organized protests against the company to persuade it to abandon its weapons production.

In 1990, Honeywell's defense division was spun off into Alliant Techsystems, whose headquarters are in Edina, a suburb of Minneapolis. Honeywell continues to supply aerospace products including jet engines.

In 1996, Honeywell acquired Duracraft and began marketing its products in the home comfort sector. Today, Kaz Incorporated owns both Duracraft and Honeywell's home comfort lines.

[edit] Specialty Materials

Honeywell’s Specialty Materials business can trace its heritage to a small sulfuric acid company started by chemist William Nichols in 1870. By the end of the 19th century, Nichols had formed several companies and was recognized as a force in America’s fledgling chemical industry. Nichols’s vision of a bigger, better chemical company took off when he teamed up with investor Eugene Meyer in 1920. Nichols and Meyer combined five smaller chemical companies to create the Allied Chemical & Dye Company, which later became Allied Chemical Corp., and eventually became part of AlliedSignal, the forerunner of Honeywell’s Specialty Materials business. Meyer went on to serve in the Coolidge, Hoover and Truman administrations and to buy the Washington Post newspaper in 1933. Both he and Nichols have buildings named after them in Honeywell’s headquarters in Morristown, N.J. Nance Dicciani is the current President and CEO of the Specialty Materials division.

[edit] GE-Honeywell merger attempt

General Electric attempted to acquire Honeywell in 2001, at which time Honeywell was valued at over $21Bn. The merger was cleared by American authorities but was blocked by the European Commission's Competition Commissioner, Mario Monti. This decision was taken on the grounds that with GE's dominance of the small jet engine market (CF34), leasing services (GECAS) and Honeywell's portfolio of regional jet engines and avionics the new company would be able to "bundle" products and stifle competition through creation of a horizontal monopoly.

[edit] Today

The current "Honeywell International Inc." is the product of a merger between AlliedSignal and Honeywell Inc. in 1999. Although AlliedSignal was the larger of the two, the combined company chose the name "Honeywell" for its superior brand recognition. However, the corporate headquarters were consolidated to AlliedSignal's headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey rather than Honeywell's historic former headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1991 Honeywell's computer division was sold to Groupe Bull.

Additionally, Honeywell International is known for its aggressive implementation and daily practice of six sigma and lean manufacturing methodologies; commonly referred to as "Six Sigma Plus". Recently, Honeywell announced the implementation of a corporate philosophy know as the Honeywell Operating System (HOS), which incorporates practices from the Toyota Production System.

[edit] Corporate governance

Current members of the board of directors of Honeywell are: Gordon Bethune, Jaime Chico Pardo, David Cote, Scott Davis, Clive Hollick, James Howard, Bruce Karatz, Russ Palmer, Ivan Seidenberg, Brad Sheares, Eric Shinseki, John R. Stafford, and Michael W. Wright.

[edit] Stock

Honeywell is traded under the ticker symbol HON on the NYSE with a market capitalization of US$30 billion (2006). The company is part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index NYSE: DJI