Takeovers

Now, retailing and starch

This year's wave of corporate takeovers already has swept up companies dealing in copper, oil, paper, beer, aspirin and dozens of other products. Last week the tide spread to retailing and starch. Los Angeles-headquartered Carter Hawley Hale, the sixth largest U.S. department store chain, proposed buying Chicago's venerable Marshall Field & Co. for an estimated $325.8 million -- over Field's resistance. And Unilever United States Inc., a subsidiary of the giant Anglo-Dutch food and household products maker, bid $482 million for National Starch & Chemical Corp. of New Jersey, a maker of food products, plastics and adhe-sives -- an offer so generous that for once the target company could not refuse.

Carter Hawley sees Marshall Field as a worthy addition to its list of platinum-plated logos, which includes Dallas' Neiman-Marcus and New York's Bergdorf Goodman. C.H.H. also would gain geographically: Field stores cover the Midwest while Carter Hawley's sales come mainly from the Sunbelt. Field's earnings have been depressed in recent years by vigorous and not entirely successful expansion. Yet the company has a good chance of turning the corner under the management of President Angelo Arena, ironically an alumnus of Neiman-Marcus, which he headed until this fall.

Arena does not like the idea of his former employer muscling in. Says he: "I told Carter Hawley their timing was inappropriate, but they kept pushing." The day the C.H.H. bid was announced, Field filed a suit charging that the merger would violate antitrust law, a standard move in takeover battles. Carter Hawley seems determined to persist, to the point of upping its bid if necessary. Analysts see no way Field can ward off an eventual merger --if not with C.H.H., then with any one of several other big department store companies.

Unilever's acquisition of National Starch will be the 16th purchase of a North American company by a British or partly British firm so far this year; the British takeovers now amount to an aggregate investment of $1 billion. Such takeovers have become easier because the falling value of the dollar enables a British firm to put up fewer pounds for a buyout. Unilever, which had 1976 revenues of $14.8 billion, dwarfs National Starch, which posted 1976 sales of $339 million. But National Starch's industrial markets complement Unilever's lines of household products, which include Lifebuoy and Wisk, Pepsodent toothpaste and Lipton tea, and would make Unilever a little less dependent on the housewife.

The takeovers have spiced an otherwise dreary stock market. Marshall Field stock last week rose from $22.75 to $29.25 a share, still short of C.H.H.'s offer of $36. National Starch shares jumped more than 20 points in a single day and closed at $65.50; even those who bought at that price will profit by selling to Unilever at $73.50. That situation points up the big gest reason for the takeover trend: prices of many stocks have sunk so low that a cash-rich company can offer a tempting premium and still pick up corporate as sets for less money than it would need to launch its own expansion program. -

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