Honeywell

Honeywell International Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	Nasdaq: HON; S&P 500 component
Industry	Aerospace, automation, advanced materials
Founded	1906 as the Honeywell Heating Specialty Company; present company formed by the 1999 merger of AlliedSignal and Honeywell Inc.
Founder	Mark C. Honeywell; predecessor founded by Albert Butz in 1885
Headquarters	Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Vimal Kapur (chairman and chief executive), Mike Stepniak (chief financial officer)
Products	Aircraft engines, avionics, auxiliary power units, industrial control systems, building management systems, sensors, process technology, specialty chemicals, quantum computers
Revenue	Approximately US$38.5 billion (2024)
Employees	Approximately 100,000
Website	honeywell.com

Honeywell International Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It operates in aerospace, industrial and building automation, energy and advanced materials, and is among the largest industrial companies in the United States. In February 2025 it announced that it would separate into three independent public companies, a process that began with the spin-off of its advanced materials business as Solstice Advanced Materials in October 2025 and which is intended to divide the remainder into aerospace and automation companies during 2026.

The present company is the product of a reverse takeover. AlliedSignal acquired Honeywell Inc. in 1999 and adopted the better-known name, so that the corporation's legal continuity runs through Allied Chemical and Dye, founded in 1920, while its identity runs through a thermostat manufacturer founded in Minneapolis in the 1880s.

History

The Honeywell line, 1885 to 1999

The company's earliest ancestor was founded by Albert Butz, a Swiss immigrant to Minneapolis, who patented the damper flapper in 1885: a device that opened the air damper of a coal furnace when a room cooled and closed it when the room warmed, using a thermostat and a motor to perform automatically what had previously required someone to attend to the fire. He formed the Butz Thermo-Electric Regulator Company, which after several reorganisations became the Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company.

Mark C. Honeywell founded the Honeywell Heating Specialty Company in Wabash, Indiana, in 1906, manufacturing hot water heat generators. The two companies merged in 1927 as the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company, which became the dominant supplier of heating controls in the United States and, by the 1950s, a substantial manufacturer of industrial and aerospace controls, adopting the name Honeywell Inc. in 1963.

Its wartime and postwar work included the C-1 autopilot used on the B-29 Superfortress, which made high-altitude precision bombing practicable, and subsequently inertial navigation, flight controls and gyroscopes, which became the basis of its aerospace business. Its round thermostat, the T87, designed by Henry Dreyfuss and introduced in 1953, is among the most widely recognised industrial designs of the twentieth century and remains in production.

Honeywell entered computing in 1955 through a joint venture with Raytheon, acquiring the computer division of General Electric in 1970 and that of Groupe Bull's French operations, and was for a period one of the group of manufacturers described as IBM and the Seven Dwarfs. It hosted the Multics operating system, whose design influenced Unix, and in 1973 won Honeywell, Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corp., in which a federal court invalidated the ENIAC patent and held that the first electronic digital computer had been the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, a decision that placed the invention of the computer in the public domain. The computer business was progressively sold to Bull between 1987 and 1991.

The company was the subject of a sustained protest campaign during the Vietnam War over its manufacture of cluster munitions, conducted by the Honeywell Project in Minneapolis from 1968, which continued for two decades and which was among the longest-running campaigns against a single American corporation.

The AlliedSignal line

Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation was formed in 1920 by the merger of five American chemical companies, partly to replace the German supply of dyes and chemicals cut off by the First World War. It became Allied Chemical in 1958 and Allied Corporation in 1981, and under Edward Hennessy acquired the Bendix Corporation in 1983 after a celebrated takeover battle in which Bendix's own attempt to acquire Martin Marietta produced a defence known as the Pac-Man strategy, in which the target attempted to acquire the acquirer.

Allied merged with the Signal Companies in 1985 to form AlliedSignal, a conglomerate spanning aerospace, automotive components and chemicals. Lawrence Bossidy, who arrived from General Electric in 1991, applied that company's methods, including Six Sigma, and improved the business substantially.

The merger and the Honeywell era, 1999 to 2017

AlliedSignal acquired Honeywell Inc. in 1999 for approximately US$15 billion and took its name. The combined company was immediately troubled: the integration was poor, earnings disappointed, and in 2000 General Electric agreed to acquire it for around US$45 billion in what would have been the largest industrial merger ever completed. The European Commission prohibited the transaction in July 2001 on the ground that the combination of GE's aircraft engines and leasing with Honeywell's avionics would permit bundling that competitors could not match, a decision the United States authorities had already cleared and which produced a transatlantic dispute about the proper purpose of merger control that has been studied extensively since.

David Cote, recruited from Tyco in 2002, led the company until 2017 and is generally credited with making it function. His approach combined cost discipline with sustained investment in research and, distinctively, with the practice of furloughing rather than dismissing employees during the 2008 recession, on the reasoning that the cost of rehiring and retraining would exceed the saving; the company emerged from that downturn with its capability intact and outperformed its peers substantially.

Honeywell also resolved, at very great cost, the asbestos liabilities inherited with Bendix, whose brake linings had contained asbestos, and the liabilities of North American Refractories, which it had acquired, and it carried out extensive environmental remediation at legacy Allied Chemical sites, including a chromium contamination in Jersey City that required the excavation of more than a million tons of soil.

Adamczyk, Kapur and the break-up, 2017 to 2026

Darius Adamczyk succeeded Cote in 2017 and continued the simplification of the portfolio, spinning off the home comfort and security business as Resideo and the transportation systems business, principally turbochargers, as Garrett Motion in October 2018. Both spin-offs carried indemnity obligations to Honeywell in respect of environmental and asbestos liabilities, arrangements that became contentious when Garrett Motion entered Chapter 11 in 2020 partly because of them and emerged with the terms renegotiated.

The company moved its headquarters from Morris Plains, New Jersey, to Charlotte in 2019, and adopted a strategy centred on software attached to its industrial products, promoted as Honeywell Forge, and on what it termed the connected enterprise.

Vimal Kapur, an Indian engineer who had joined Honeywell in 1989 and run the performance materials and building technologies businesses, became chief executive in June 2023 and chairman in 2024. He reorganised the company around three megatrends it identified as automation, the future of aviation and the energy transition, and conducted an unusually active programme of transactions: acquiring Carrier's global access solutions business for US$4.95 billion, CAES Systems for US$1.9 billion in defence electronics, Civitanavi Systems in navigation, Air Products' liquefied natural gas process technology business for US$1.81 billion, and Sundyne for US$2.16 billion, while agreeing to sell its personal protective equipment business to Protective Industrial Products for US$1.325 billion.

In November 2024 the activist investor Elliott Investment Management disclosed a stake exceeding US$5 billion and argued publicly that the conglomerate structure produced a valuation below the sum of its parts and that aerospace and automation should be separated. Honeywell announced in February 2025 that it would separate into three independent companies.

The first step, the spin-off of Advanced Materials as Solstice Advanced Materials, completed on 30 October 2025. The business holds fluorine products, including the Solstice low-global-warming refrigerants and blowing agents that replaced hydrofluorocarbons, Spectra fibre used in body armour, and electronic and specialty materials.

The remaining company is to be divided into Honeywell Aerospace and Honeywell Automation during 2026, a separation whose logic is that the two businesses share no customers, no technology and no capital requirements, and whose counter-argument is that the conglomerate's central functions, its balance sheet and its ability to move engineers between problems have been genuine sources of advantage.

Business

Aerospace Technologies

Aerospace is the largest segment, producing roughly 40 per cent of revenue and a larger share of profit. It supplies auxiliary power units, of which Honeywell is by a wide margin the leading manufacturer, fitted to the majority of commercial aircraft and providing electrical and pneumatic power on the ground and in emergency; propulsion engines for business jets, regional aircraft, helicopters and unmanned systems, including the TFE731, HTF7000 and T55; avionics including flight management systems, the Primus and Epic integrated flight decks, weather radar, and the enhanced ground proximity warning system, an invention of Honeywell's predecessor C. Donald Bateman that is credited with substantially eliminating controlled flight into terrain, historically the largest single category of airliner accident; inertial navigation and satellite communications; wheels and brakes; and defence electronics.

The aftermarket, comprising spares, repairs and upgrades on equipment already flying, produces a very large proportion of the segment's profit, and the business is consequently valued for the size of the installed base rather than for current deliveries.

Industrial Automation

Industrial Automation supplies process control systems, principally the Experion platform used in refineries, petrochemical plants and paper mills, where the Total Distributed Control system Honeywell introduced in 1975 was the first of its kind and where the company remains among the two or three leading suppliers; sensing and safety products including gas detection and personal protective equipment; warehouse automation through Intelligrated, acquired in 2016, which supplies conveyors, sortation and robotics to distribution centres; and productivity solutions including barcode scanners and mobile computers.

Building Automation

Building Automation supplies control systems, fire detection, security and energy management for commercial buildings, together with the access control business acquired from Carrier. Its origins lie directly in the thermostat business of 1885, and the segment's argument is that buildings account for a substantial share of global energy consumption and that most of them are controlled by equipment installed decades ago.

Energy and Sustainability Solutions

This segment contains UOP, acquired with AlliedSignal and dating from 1914, which licenses the catalytic processes used in a very large proportion of the world's refineries. UOP's inventions include the fluid catalytic cracking and platforming processes that determine how crude oil becomes petrol and petrochemicals, and it has more recently licensed processes for sustainable aviation fuel, for carbon capture and for the recycling of plastics.

The segment also contained the advanced materials business separated as Solstice.

Quantum computing

Honeywell developed trapped-ion quantum computers from around 2014, using its expertise in precision lasers, vacuum systems and control electronics, and in 2021 combined the business with Cambridge Quantum Computing to form Quantinuum, in which Honeywell retains a majority. Trapped-ion systems have fewer qubits than the superconducting machines built by IBM and Google but higher fidelity and full connectivity between qubits, and Quantinuum has repeatedly held records for quantum volume, a measure combining both. It was valued at approximately US$10 billion in a 2025 funding round, and its eventual separation has been contemplated.

The computing era

Honeywell's period as a computer manufacturer, between 1955 and 1991, is among the more substantial episodes in its history and has been largely forgotten because the business ended.

It began with Datamatic, a joint venture with Raytheon formed in 1955, whose Datamatic 1000 was a very large machine of which few were sold. Honeywell bought out Raytheon in 1957 and established Honeywell Electronic Data Processing, whose Honeywell 200 of 1963 was the company's commercial success: it was designed to run programs written for the IBM 1401 through a translation system called the Liberator, a direct attack on the installed base of the best-selling computer of the period, and it obliged IBM to accelerate the introduction of the System/360.

In 1970 Honeywell bought the computer business of General Electric, which brought the GE-600 series and the Multics project, a joint undertaking with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bell Labs to build a time-sharing utility. Multics introduced or refined a large number of ideas including hierarchical file systems, dynamic linking, ring-based protection, a command shell and the writing of an operating system in a high-level language. Bell Labs withdrew from the project and two of its participants, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, went on to write Unix, whose name was a play on Multics and whose design was in part a reaction against it; the intellectual descent from Multics through Unix to Linux, macOS and Android is direct.

Honeywell, Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corp., decided in the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota in October 1973 after the longest trial in federal history to that date, invalidated the ENIAC patent held by Sperry Rand on grounds including prior art in the Atanasoff-Berry Computer built at Iowa State College. The judgment placed the fundamental invention of the automatic electronic digital computer in the public domain and removed the royalty Sperry Rand had been collecting from the industry, an outcome of considerable commercial consequence to every manufacturer including Honeywell itself.

The business declined against IBM and the minicomputer manufacturers, was combined with the French company Bull and with NEC from 1987 as Honeywell Bull, and Honeywell's remaining interest was sold by 1991.

Products in detail

Thermostats and controls

The Honeywell T86 round thermostat, designed by Henry Dreyfuss and introduced in 1953, replaced a rectangular device that collected dust on its ledge with a circular one that did not, and which could be installed without regard to whether it was level. More than a hundred million have been produced, it is in the permanent collection of several design museums, and it is among the small number of industrial objects recognisable to people who could not name its maker.

The thermostat business passed to Resideo in the 2018 spin-off, which licenses the Honeywell Home brand, so that the product with which the company is most identified is no longer made by it.

Aerospace products

The auxiliary power unit is a small gas turbine in the tail of an aircraft that provides electrical power and compressed air when the main engines are not running, permits engine starting, and supplies emergency power in flight. Honeywell's 131-9 and 331 series are fitted to the majority of Airbus and Boeing narrowbody and widebody aircraft, and the position is close to a duopoly with Pratt and Whitney Canada.

Its propulsion engines power a large proportion of business aircraft, including the TFE731 and HTF7000 families, and its T55 turboshaft powers the Boeing CH-47 Chinook, in production since 1962 and now being re-engined for service into the 2060s.

Its avionics include the Primus Epic and Epic 2 integrated flight decks, the Primus weather radar range, the IntuVue three-dimensional radar, and the satellite communications equipment supplying in-flight connectivity, including the JetWave terminals used with Inmarsat's services.

Process technology

Experion PKS is the distributed control system through which refineries, chemical plants, power stations and pharmaceutical facilities are operated, descending directly from the TDC 2000 of 1975, the first digital distributed control system, which replaced panels of pneumatic and analogue instruments with computers and screens and which changed the physical arrangement of a control room permanently.

UOP licenses more than a hundred processes and supplies the catalysts and adsorbents they require, including the zeolite catalysts on which catalytic cracking depends. Its Ecofining process, developed with Eni, converts vegetable oils and animal fats into renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel, and its carbon capture and methanol-to-olefins technologies are licensed internationally.

Competition

In aerospace Honeywell competes with RTX Corporation's Collins Aerospace and Pratt and Whitney units, with GE Aerospace, with Safran, with Thales and with Garmin in business aviation avionics, where Garmin has taken substantial share in smaller aircraft.

In process automation it competes with Emerson Electric, ABB, Siemens, Yokogawa and Schneider Electric. In building automation with Johnson Controls, Siemens, Schneider and Carrier Global. In warehouse automation with Daifuku, Dematic and a large number of robotics companies. In process licensing with Shell, Axens, Lummus and ExxonMobil's licensing arm.

The industrial software layer it has attempted to build through Honeywell Forge competes with the offerings of all of these and with the industrial platforms of Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Siemens, and none of the incumbents has yet demonstrated that customers will pay separately for software attached to equipment they have already bought.

Technology and research

Honeywell's research organisation has produced inventions of consequence across several unrelated fields, a consequence of the conglomerate structure it is now dismantling.

The ring laser gyroscope, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, replaced spinning-mass gyroscopes in aircraft navigation with a device having no moving parts, measuring rotation by the frequency difference between counter-rotating laser beams in a closed path. It made inertial navigation reliable enough for routine commercial aviation and is fitted to a very large proportion of the world's aircraft.

The enhanced ground proximity warning system, developed by C. Donald Bateman, compares an aircraft's position and trajectory against a terrain database and warns the crew before impact. Before its introduction, flight into terrain under control of the crew was the largest single cause of airliner fatalities; since its mandatory fitment the category has almost disappeared from the accident record in countries where it is required, and Bateman received the National Medal of Technology for it.

Fluid catalytic cracking, developed at UOP and its predecessors, converts heavy petroleum fractions into petrol and light olefins and is the process by which most of the world's motor fuel is produced. Platforming, also from UOP, produces high-octane components and aromatics. The processes are licensed rather than operated, so that UOP earns from refineries it does not own.

Spectra fibre, an ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, is among the strongest fibres produced and is used in body armour, ropes and composite armour. Solstice refrigerants and blowing agents, hydrofluoroolefins with very low global warming potential, replaced the hydrofluorocarbons that replaced the chlorofluorocarbons, closing a sequence that began with the ozone layer.

The company also developed early automatic flight controls, the autopilot used on strategic bombers, the first commercial digital control systems for process industries, and a substantial body of sensor technology.

Defence and space

Honeywell has been a defence contractor since the Second World War, when its C-1 autopilot equipped American heavy bombers, and its current work spans guidance and navigation, defence electronics acquired with CAES Systems in 2024, actuation, power systems and the management of government facilities.

It operates the Kansas City National Security Campus for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manufactures the non-nuclear components of American nuclear weapons, approximately 80 per cent of the parts in a warhead, including electronics, arming and firing systems and specialised materials. The facility employs several thousand people and is among the largest single sites Honeywell manages, and its work has made the company a continuing subject of protest by disarmament organisations.

In space, Honeywell has supplied reaction wheels, gyroscopes, control moment gyroscopes and inertial measurement units for satellites and crewed spacecraft since the Apollo program, and its components are aboard a very large proportion of the spacecraft launched by Western operators. It has worked on the James Webb Space Telescope, on the International Space Station and on Mars missions, and supplies the reaction wheels whose failure has ended several missions, a fact that illustrates both the criticality of the component and the difficulty of qualifying a supplier for it.

The Honeywell Operating System

Honeywell adopted Six Sigma from General Electric under Lawrence Bossidy at AlliedSignal in 1994, among the earliest companies to do so outside Motorola, where it originated, and combined it with lean manufacturing methods into what it calls the Honeywell Operating System.

The approach applies statistical quality control, standardised work, visual management and continuous improvement across manufacturing and, subsequently, across engineering and administrative processes. It has been extended into Honeywell Digital, a programme to apply the same discipline to data and systems, and into the Honeywell Accelerator, which codifies how the company conducts product development, sales and integration of acquisitions.

The practical significance is in acquisitions. A company that buys businesses frequently requires a standard method of integrating them, and Honeywell's ability to apply a documented set of processes to an acquired operation within a defined period is among the reasons its acquisition record is better than that of most conglomerates.

Philanthropy and sponsorship

Honeywell Hometown Solutions, the corporate citizenship programme, concentrates on science and mathematics education, family safety and housing, and humanitarian relief. Its best-known activity is Honeywell Leadership Challenge Academy, run with the United States Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, which brings secondary school students from around the world to a residential programme in science and engineering, and the Honeywell Educators at Space Academy programme for teachers, which has trained several thousand from more than sixty countries.

The company also runs the Honeywell Initiative for Science and Engineering, which sends Nobel laureates and prominent researchers to speak at universities, and supports FIRST robotics competitions.

Timeline

Key dates include Albert Butz's damper flapper patent in 1885; Mark Honeywell's founding of the Honeywell Heating Specialty Company in 1906; the merger creating Minneapolis-Honeywell in 1927; the C-1 autopilot of the Second World War; the formation of Allied Chemical and Dye in 1920 and the founding of UOP in 1914; the T86 round thermostat in 1953; entry into computing in 1955; the adoption of the Honeywell Inc. name in 1963 and the Honeywell 200 the same year; the acquisition of GE's computer business and the Multics work from 1970; the ENIAC patent decision in 1973; the TDC 2000 control system in 1975; Allied's acquisition of Bendix in 1983; the AlliedSignal merger in 1985; the sale of the computer business by 1991; the AlliedSignal acquisition of Honeywell in 1999; the European Commission's prohibition of the General Electric merger in July 2001; David Cote's appointment in 2002; the Resideo and Garrett spin-offs in October 2018; the move to Charlotte in 2019; the formation of Quantinuum in 2021; Vimal Kapur's appointment in June 2023; Elliott's intervention in November 2024; the announcement of the three-way separation in February 2025; and the spin-off of Solstice Advanced Materials on 30 October 2025.

Corporate affairs

Governance and ownership

Honeywell is listed on the Nasdaq, having moved from the New York Stock Exchange in 2023, and is a component of the S&P 500. It has no controlling shareholder. Vimal Kapur is chairman and chief executive, and the board added a representative connected with Elliott Investment Management following that firm's 2024 campaign.

Employees and locations

The company employs approximately 100,000 people across more than 70 countries. Besides Charlotte, major locations include Phoenix, where the aerospace propulsion business is centred, Torrance and Redmond for navigation, Houston for process solutions and UOP's Des Plaines campus near Chicago, Atlanta for building technologies, Broomfield in Colorado for quantum computing, and very large operations in Bengaluru, Shanghai, Brno and Bucharest.

Financial performance

Honeywell reported revenue of approximately US$38.5 billion in 2024 with segment margins in the low twenties, among the highest of any large industrial company. Its earnings are comparatively stable because a substantial proportion derives from aftermarket parts, service contracts, software subscriptions and process licences rather than from equipment sales, and the aerospace aftermarket in particular grows with flying hours rather than with aircraft deliveries.

The investment case that Elliott advanced, and which the company ultimately accepted, was that the market applies a conglomerate discount: aerospace suppliers trade at high multiples, automation companies at lower ones, and a company containing both is valued at neither. The counter-case, made by Honeywell's management until 2025, was that the central functions, the balance sheet and the transfer of methods between divisions produced real value, and that the historical record of industrial conglomerates breaking themselves up is not uniformly encouraging.

Legacy liabilities

Honeywell carries obligations arising from businesses conducted decades ago by companies it acquired.

Asbestos. Bendix brake linings contained asbestos, and North American Refractories, acquired by Honeywell, produced refractory products containing it. Both produced very large numbers of personal injury claims, resolved through trusts established under Chapter 11 procedures for the subsidiaries concerned and through settlements, at a cumulative cost in the billions of dollars. Honeywell transferred a substantial part of the remaining exposure to insurers in 2018 through an arrangement with Berkshire Hathaway's National Indemnity.

Environmental remediation. Allied Chemical's operations left contamination at a considerable number of sites. The most substantial is chromium contamination in Jersey City and surrounding areas of New Jersey, arising from a chromate production plant operated from 1905 to 1954, where Honeywell has excavated and removed well over a million tons of contaminated soil under consent decrees, in one of the largest such projects in the United States. The Onondaga Lake remediation in Syracuse, New York, addressing mercury and other contamination from an Allied soda ash plant, involved dredging and capping the lake bed and has been described as among the most extensive freshwater cleanups conducted.

The company has spent several billion dollars on these obligations and carries provisions against the remainder, and the allocation of them among the successor companies was a central question in the design of the separation.

Controversies

Besides the Vietnam-era cluster munitions campaign and the environmental matters above, Honeywell has been the subject of a number of enforcement actions. It paid US$81 million in 2022 to settle bribery charges brought by American and Brazilian authorities concerning payments to obtain business from Petrobras and in Algeria, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It has paid penalties over export control violations, including the unauthorised transfer of technical drawings for military components to China and other countries, resolved with a US$13 million settlement in 2021. It was fined by the Environmental Protection Agency on various occasions over the handling of hazardous materials.

Its role as a defence contractor, supplying components for guided weapons and for the American nuclear weapons complex through its management of the Kansas City National Security Campus, has made it a recurring subject of protest, as it was during the Vietnam period.

Brand and identity

The Honeywell name survives on a company that has not been the Honeywell of 1927 since 1999, and the decision by AlliedSignal to adopt it rather than retain its own is among the clearer instances of a brand being judged more valuable than the corporate identity that owned it. AlliedSignal was known to industrial buyers; Honeywell was known to households, largely because of a thermostat.

The forward-slash device introduced in 2001, in which the letters are accompanied by a red rectangle divided by a diagonal, was intended to signify forward motion and has been used without substantive revision since, an unusual constancy in a company that has changed its portfolio almost entirely over the same period.

The name is also attached to products the company no longer makes. Resideo licenses Honeywell Home for thermostats and security, Garrett Motion used it for a transition period on turbochargers, and Solstice Advanced Materials operates under its own identity while carrying products developed under Honeywell's. Licensing a name to businesses one has disposed of preserves value in the short term and gradually detaches the name from anything the company does, a tension the separation of 2025 and 2026 will sharpen further, since two of the three successor companies will contend for the same identity.

Whether the Honeywell name will attach principally to the aerospace company or to the automation company after the division has not been settled publicly, and the question is not trivial: in aerospace the name signifies equipment certified into aircraft and supported for decades, and in automation it signifies the control room and the building, and the two constituencies have little overlap.

Assessment

Honeywell is among the last of the American industrial conglomerates assembled in the twentieth century, and its dissolution follows those of General Electric, DuPont, Dow, Tyco, ITT and United Technologies in accepting that the structure no longer produces the advantages that justified it.

What it leaves is a set of unusually durable positions. The auxiliary power unit business, the terrain warning system, the process control installed base, the UOP licence portfolio and the aerospace aftermarket are each businesses in which the incumbent's advantage derives from equipment installed over decades and from the extreme reluctance of customers to change a supplier whose product is embedded in a certified aircraft or a running refinery. Such positions are difficult to create and difficult to lose, and they are the reason the company's margins are what they are.

Its record since 1999 is better than the merger that created it suggested it would be, and the credit is generally given to David Cote's decade, in which a poorly integrated combination was made to work. Whether three separate companies perform better than one is a question the next several years will answer, and the historical evidence on comparable separations is mixed.