Merger & acquisition mania

Mergers and acquisitions (known as "M&A" in the financial world) have been going lickety-split for many years. This makes me think of the companies that I worked for during my 43 years of toiling (I also worked as a part-time consultant for several years after retiring from full-time work). I worked for seven companies, six of which were publicly-held and one was privately-owned; six of the seven publicly-held companies have merged or disappeared.

The thought of acquisitions is with me because of the announcement just a few days ago of the proposed takeover of Mercantile Bankshares--the holding company of Mercantile-Safe Deposit & Trust Co., in Baltimore--by PNC Financial Services Group, located in Pittsburgh. Mercantile is a blue-blood institution in Baltimore and the last independent major bank–the news of the takeover has reverberated throughout the city. As described below, I worked at Mercantile for 18 years.

My first employer was the public accounting firm Price Waterhouse. I worked for it as an intern in its New York office while still a senior at the University of North Carolina; after graduation, I went back to its permanent staff. Some years ago the firm merged with Coopers Lybrand to form what is now PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Next I went to work for Texaco, the international oil company (whose official name at the time was The Texas Company), as a trainee in its foreign accounting department at its headquarters in the Chrysler Building in New York City. After about 18 months, I was dispatched to a tour of duty at its office in Puerto Rico and, later, to another tour in Dakar, Senegal (Senegal was then a French colony in west Africa but has been independent since 1958). Texaco was acquired by the oil company Chevron in 2001 (Texaco still markets petroleum products under its own name).

Then I returned to the USA to work for Shell Oil Co. at its regional office in Baltimore. Shell is the only one of the six publicly-held companies that I worked for which has remained independent (it is part of the Royal Dutch Shell group of companies).

Next was Commercial Credit Co. in Baltimore; it was founded in 1902 in Baltimore and its stock was publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange during my tenure there. In the late 1960's (1968, I believe) it was acquired in a shotgun wedding by Control Data, a computer company in Minnesota–the acquisition was done to stave off another unwanted suitor, a Hartford insurance company. It was later acquired and reacquired several times by different companies–and picked apart in the process--until remnants of it ended up in Citicorp.

My next employer (after having worked for the private company in Baltimore, following Commercial Credit) was Mercantile-Safe Deposit & Trust Co., in Baltimore, which was by far the largest trust company in the city at the time. I worked there for 18 years as a security analyst, analyzing stocks and bonds held in trust accounts. On October 9, 2006 the news of the proposed acquisition by PNC broke.

My last position was with Alexander & Alexander, the second largest insurance broker in the world during my time there. I worked at its Baltimore area financial center as a financial analyst in solvency assessment of insurance carriers used to place our clients’ coverage. (Solvency assessment is the analysis of insurance companies’ financial strength to avoid those which might not be around to pay future claims.) A&A was acquired in the late 1990's by Aon Corp., a rival insurance broker headquartered in Chicago, and merged into Aon, i.e., A&A no longer exists as an operating entity.

The Baltimore area has lost numerous companies over the years, either independent ones headquartered in the area or large operations of companies headquartered elsewhere. The following companies, which were in business when I came to live in the area in 1955 have disappeared or have been taken over by other companies from elsewhere. (I am just naming them off the top of my head; there are probably others.) Most of these companies completely shut down years ago; others, such as Bethlehem Steel and the insurance companies Fidelity & Deposit and Maryland Casualty, were taken over by other companies far from Baltimore and, as to size of their operations, are mere skeletons of their former selves.

Continental Can
American Can
Koppers Co.
Bethlehem Steel
Arrow Brewing Co.
Gunther Brewing Co.
Maryland Shipbuilding and Drydock
American Smelting & Refining
Crown Cork & Seal
Crosse & Blackwell
Exxon (operated a small refinery while still Esso)
Peterson, Howell & Heather
Noxema
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
Shell Oil Co. (split up its regional office, with some employees sent to New York and others to Atlanta)
General Motors (closed a large assembly plant two or three years ago)
Western Electric
Martin Marietta (I think it has a small operation in the area following the move of most of its activities to Florida and elsewhere).
Fidelity & Deposit
Maryland Casualty
New Amsterdam
United States Fidelity & Guaranty
Mount Vernon Mills
Schenuit Tire & Rubber
Three major department stores: Hutzlers, Hochschild Kohn, and Stewarts
Braeger Gutman, a discount department store
Upscale men's stores: Eddie Jacob (where I bought my wedding suit) and Hamburgers

1 Comment
Anonymous said...
Don't forget the Baltimore Colts....
Tuesday, October 17, 2006 7:50:29 PM

Good point, Anonymous. Mycroft

The Baltimore Colts were Baltimore’s National Football League team from 1953 through 1983. They won the NFL championship title twice, in 1958 and 1959, both times against the New York Giants. The 1958 game, which the Colts won by 23-17 in Yankee Stadium in New York on 12/28/58, has been called by numerous sportswriters as "the greatest game of football ever played" (for my first-hand experience of the game, see my 9/24/06 posting Football is in the air). They didn’t do so well in the 1964 championship game, losing 27-0 to the Cleveland Browns in Cleveland on 12/27/64; I remember the game well because I had been commuting to Cleveland on business every week around the time of the game, and had shot off my mouth to my Cleveland business colleagues about how bad the Colts were going to crush the Browns, so I had to eat crow when I faced those colleagues in Cleveland the next day after the game.

Those NFL championship games were before the Super Bowl started in 1967 to determine a champion; the Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys by 16-13 in Super Bowl V on 10/17/71 in the Orange Bowl in Miami.

After those 31 years in Baltimore, the team was spirited away to Indianapolis in the dead of night during a snowstorm in early 1984 to become the Indianapolis Colts. Thus, Baltimore was without a professional football team for 12 years until the Cleveland Browns franchise was moved by its owner to Baltimore in 1996, to become the Baltimore Ravens. (During part of those 12 years, a Canadian league team, the Baltimore Broncos, represented the city, playing by Canadian rules–which most Baltimore fans never caught on to.) The Ravens went to Super Bowl XXXV on 1/28/01 in Tampa and beat the New York Giants (again!) by 34-7 (the Ravens went as a wild-card team, meaning that they did not win their league’s championship but went into the playoffs to decide who would go to the Super Bowl as a third choice).