Business Notes MERGERS

Ordinarily it takes decades to build an industrial behemoth on the scale of General Electric, West Germany's Siemens or Japan's Hitachi, but last week a world-class electrical-engineering giant was born practically overnight. In a surprise strategic move, two smaller European competitors -- Switzerland's Brown, Boveri and Sweden's ASEA -- announced a plan to merge their main operating divisions into a joint venture that would boast annual sales of more than $15 billion and employ some 160,000 workers. The new ASEA Brown Boveri should be a potent competitor in the global market for heavy electrical products, among them generating plants, high-speed trains and broadcasting equipment.