AT&T- NCR:FAILED MERGER NCR was acquired September 19, 1991 by AT&T for $7.

4 billion and was joined with Teradata Corporation on February 28, 1992. As an AT&T subsidiary, its 1992 year-end headcount was 53,800 employees and contractors.[12] By 1993, the subsidiary produced a year-end $1.287 billion net loss on $7.265 billion in revenue. The net losses continued in 1994 and 1995, losses that required repeated subsidies from the parent company and resulted in a 1995 year-end headcount of 41,100.[12] During these three years, AT&T was the former NCR's largest customer, accounting for over $1.5 billion in revenue.[12] On February 15, 1995, the company sold its microelectronics division and storage systems division to Hyundai which named it Symbios Logic. At the time it was the largest purchase of an American company by a Korean company. For a while, starting in 1994, the subsidiary was renamed AT&T Global Information Solutions, but in 1995, AT&T decided to spin off the company, and in 1996, changed its name back to NCR in preparation for the spin-off. The company outlined its reasons for the spin-off in an Information Statement sent to its stockholders, which cited, in addition to "changes in customer needs" and "need for focused management time and attention", the following: ...[A]dvantages of vertical integration [which had motivated ATT's earlier acquisition of NCR] are outweighed by its costs and disadvantages....[T]o varying degrees, many of the actual and potential customers of Lucent and NCR are or will be competitors of AT&T's communications services businesses. NCR believes that its efforts to target the communications industry have been hindered by the reluctance of AT&T's communications services competitors to make purchases from an AT&T subsidiary. NCR re-emerged as a stand-alone company on January 1, 1997. Independence One of NCR's first significant acquisitions after becoming independent from AT&T came in July 1997 when it purchased Compris Technologies, a privately held company in Kennesaw, Georgia that produced software for restaurant chains.[13] In November 1997, NCR purchased Dataworks Inc., a 60-person privately held company in San Antonio, Texas.[14] The Montgomery County Historical Society and NCR Corporation joined in 1998 into an innovative partnership committed to preserving the voluminous NCR Archive. For more than three months in late 1999, trucks traveled between NCR's Building 28 and the Historical Society's Research Center, taking three million pieces of an extraordinary collection to their new home.

In 1998, NCR sold its computer hardware manufacturing assets to Solectron and ceased to produce general-purpose computer systems, focusing instead on the retail and financial industries. In 2000, NCR acquired CRM provider Ceres Integrated Solutions and services company 4Front Technologies. Recent acquisitions include self-service companies Kinetics, InfoAmerica and Galvanon, and software company DecisionPoint. In 2006, NCR acquired software company IDVelocity and the ATM manufacturing division of Tidel, a cash security equipment manufacturer specializing in retail markets. In 2009, NCR became the second largest DVD Kiosk operator in North America with the acquisitions of The New Release and DVD Play. In 2010, NCR completed the acquisition of digital signage company, Netkey. Today, NCR's R&D activity is split between its three major centres in Atlanta USA (Retail), Dundee, Scotland (Financial Industry), and Waterloo, Canada. It also has R&D centres in Pondicherry and Hyderabad in India.[15] NCR also has a manufacturing facility at Pondicherry in India, which is a regional manufacturing and export hub.

This is a book about how to create new growth in business. Growth is important because companies create shareholder value through profitable growth. Yet there is powerful evidence that once a companys core business has matured, the pursuit of new platforms for growth entails daunting risk. Roughly one company in ten is able to sustain the kind of growth that translates into an above-average increase in shareholder returns over more than a few years.1 Too often the very attempt to grow causes the entire corporation to crash. Consequently, most executives are in a no-win situation: equity markets demand that they grow, but its hard to know how to grow. Pursuing growth the wrong way can be worse than no growth at all. Consider AT&T. In the wake of the government-mandated divestiture of its local telephony services in 1984, AT&T became primarily a long distance telecommunications services provider. The break-up agreement freed the company to invest in new businesses, so management almost immediately began seeking avenues for growth and the shareholder value that growth creates. The first such attempt arose from a widely shared view that computer systems and telephone networks were going to converge. AT&T first tried to build its own computer division in order to position itself at that intersection, but was able to do no better than annual losses of $200 million. Rather than retreat from a business that had proved to be unassailable from the outside, the company decided in 1991 to bet bigger still, acquiring NCR, at the time the worlds fifth-largest computer maker, for $7.4 billion. That proved only to be a down payment: AT&T lost another $2 billion trying to make the acquisition work. AT&T finally abandoned this growth vision in 1996, selling NCR for $3.4 billion, about a third of what it had invested in the opportunity. But the company had to grow. So even as the NCR acquisition was failing, AT&T was seeking growth opportunities in technologies closer to its core. In light of the success of the wireless services that several of its spun-off local telephone companies had achieved, in 1994 the company bought McCaw Cellular, at the time the largest national wireless carrier in the United States, for $11.6 billion, eventually spending $15 billion in total on its own wireless business. When Wall Street analysts subsequently complained that they were unable to properly value the combined higher-growth wireless business within the lower-growth wireline company, AT&T

decided to create a separately traded stock for the wireless business in 2000. This valued the business at $10.6 billion, about two-thirds of the investment AT&T had made in the venture. But that move left the AT&T wireline stock right where it had started, and the company had to grow. So in 1998 it embarked upon a strategy to enter and reinvent the local telephony business with broadband technology. Acquiring TCI and MediaOne for a combined price of $112 billion made AT&T Broadband the largest cable operator in the United States. Then, more quickly than anyone could have foreseen, the difficulties in implementation and integration proved insurmountable. In 2000, AT&T agreed to sell its cable assets to Comcast for $72 billion.2 In the space of a little over ten years, AT&T had wasted about $50 billion and destroyed even more in shareholder valueall in the hope of creating shareholder value through growth.