"We don't want to get in the way of Baldor's brands at all," says Joe Hogan, CEO of ABB Ltd. Ulrich Spiesshofer, CEO of the newly reorganized Industrial Motion division of ABB said, "Today we are transferring management of all our North America motors and drives business to Fort Smith."
Regarding the fact that historically, combining motors and drives businesses have been unsuccessful from a channel perspective (that's one of the reasons Rockwell sold Reliance to Baldor in the first place), Hogan said, "There has never been a company with the level of expertise and breadth of product line than this acquisition gives us. If our customers want to mix and match, we'll mix and match. We will do whatever our customers ask us to."
Hogan and Spiesshofer do not expect any antitrust issues with this acquisiton, either from the US government or the EC. They do not feel it necessary to make any financial filings in China, and they are approaching filing in Europe by individual country rather than making a general EC filing.
Hogan points to the synergies as the reason that the deal will be "EPS accretive from Day One," with more than $1 billion value creation for the stockholders, at a nearly 2x GDP growth rate.
"This is a complementary pairing," Hogan said, in the conference call, when asked if the acquisition would affect or change the competitive dynamics in North America. "It isn't going to change the overall competitive dynamics."
The PDF of the ABB presentation is available here: http://bit.ly/ejJbfk
A recording of the conference call will be available for the next 24 hours on the ABB website, www.abb.com.
