What were the reasons of the acquisition of Zenith by Bull?
After the Honeywell acquisition, Bull was committed to the worldwide market. Bull was convinced that there was no way to attack successfully the US PC market from its French base, that was trailing behind IBM and Compaq. Zenith was publicly for sale and had a competitive engineering and sales organization. The initial price asked for Zenith was challenged by its shareholders and the “goodwill” that Bull finally agreed to pay was probably too high, because it was not obvious that a foreign company could durably keep the DoD contracts and because the engineering assets were very volatile.
