Choosing Partners

Merger continues to be the name of the biggest game in U.S. business.

Among last week's events on the merger-go-round:

-> Gulf & Western Industries, having further broadened its diversified operations (auto parts, mining, chemicals) by acquiring Paramount Pictures last year, moved into consumer products for the first time by reaching an agreement to buy out Consolidated Cigar, the nation's biggest cigar maker (Dutch Masters, El Producto, Muriel), in a $150 million stock swap. At the same time, Gulf & Western's young (40), acquisitive chairman, Charles Bluhdorn, sweetened his company's stock offer for E.W. Bliss Co., an Ohio-based tool-equipment manufacturer that, like Consolidated, had 1966 sales of about $158 million. If the Bliss deal goes through on the heels of the Consolidated takeover, Gulf & Western's annual sales level, currently $700 million, will easily increase to $1 billion.

>International Telephone & Telegraph has encountered stiff Justice Department opposition to its proposed merger with American Broadcasting Co. But that has failed to dampen ITT's ardor for picking up other corporations. Its latest morsel: Rayonier Inc., a $171 million-a-year manufacturer of pulp products. The communications giant also has a line out in hopes of acquiring Western Power & Gas Co., a public utility operating in 13 states from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic. -- General Telephone & Electronics Corp., the nation's largest independent telephone system, stood to get even larger by agreeing to a $145 million stock transaction that will merge Northern Ohio Telephone Co. into a new General Telephone subsidiary. The takeover of Northern Ohio, which serves 161,000 telephones in 24 Ohio counties, comes just three months after an even bigger deal with the 310,000-phone Hawaiian Telephone Co., and it expands General Telephone's U.S. network to 8,600,000 phones.

> Consolidated Foods Corp., the huge Chicago-based food processor and distributor, hopes to double its sales to $2 billion by 1975, is hungry for acquisitions to help it reach that goal. The latest possibility: New York-based Chock Full O'Nuts, a coffee-processing and luncheonette-chain operation (1966 sales: $48 million), which is holding merger talks with Consolidated. -- Control Data Corp., a leading manufacturer of computer hardware, agreed to take over a well-matched mate: C-E-I-R Inc., a $22 million-a-year, Washington-based computer software outfit that provides data-processing services. Like much of the computer industry, both Control Data and C-E-l-R have had their ups and downs, but for Control Data the news of late has been mostly up. Rebounding from a disastrous $1,678,000 loss last year, the company last week announced fiscal 1967 earnings of $8,406,000 on revenues of $245 million.

> John Nuveen & Co., one of the nation's largest municipal bond houses, was negotiating for the purchase of Arthur Wiesenberger & Co., a New York Stock Exchange member firm whose founder, now 70, went into the business in 1938 after a colorful career as an author on merchandising (one of his books: Merchandising Bargain Basements). For Chicago-based Nuveen, acquiring Wiesenberger would be in line with the recent trend among municipal bond houses, which have diversified into other securities operations because of increasingly vigorous competition from commercial banks.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.