Honeywell to Buy Intermec

We’ve been an Intermec partner for quite a while so were interested to see the news that the company is looking to sell itself to Honeywell for about $600 million.

Honeywell has been on an acquisition spree in the Auto ID business over the last few years, having already bought Hand Held Products, Metrologic and LXE. Adding Intermec to the group will make Honeywell a bigger player in the industry (and better able to compete with Motorola Solutions) both in the mobile computer segment and in label printing. At the moment, Honeywell has no presence in the label print business so it will be interesting to see how it handles the Intermec products.

How this is going to affect Winco ID as an Intermec partner remains to be seen. There are always changes (not always for the best) when deals of this nature occur, but we will continue to support our customers that use Intermec products as well as provide new Intermec equipment as needed.

Intermec has been developing some good new label printer models of late and we hope that Honeywell will support this product line and continue to refine it. I’m sure that some of the Intermec barcode scanning technology (which really has improved a lot of the last couple of years) will find its way into HHP and LXE scanners already made by Honeywell.

Maybe the new products will cause Honeywell to produce everything here in the US. That would be nice!

VDC (one of the best sources for information in the Auto ID biz) has a good write up on the HoneyMec deal on their site.

One thing I’d hope to see from this deal is some stability. Intermec has such a high churn rate of people in our region (Northeast USA) that we have often lost track as to who are contacts are. I’ll also be very interested to see what happens to Intermec’s stationary printer and media businesses that don’t seem to fit into the Honeywell portfolio as well as the mobile devices do.

What do you think? Is this a good deal for all concerned? Will Intermec be Honeywell’s Autonomy?