Johnson Controls has merged with Tyco in an inversion move to avoid US taxes, since Tyco is headquartered in Ireland. Johnson Controls owns the majority share of the combined company, and the Tyco name will be dropped in favor of “Johnson Controls PLC”. It’s not yet clear how this will affect SimplexGrinnell, other than “the combined company hopes to tie together complementary businesses — including heating and air-conditioning systems, fire protection and security technology”.
Interesting…
I wonder what’s going to happen with their rebrands of Honeywell stuff now that SimplexGrinnell is part of them.
I’d assume that they’d stop rebranding Honeywell stuff because they have the entire Simplex arsenal. They were direct competitors already and now even more so. Just call everything “Simplex” and it’s a day, kind of like how EST was still EST under GE ownership.
Do you think the Simplex name will be kept, like when Eaton purchased Cooper?
I think without question the Simplex name will remain. They have built up their brand and reputation so much that it would be silly to replace it. However, I can definitely see the -Grinnell being dropped and replaced with something from Johnson Controls.
SimplexJohnson Controls? :lol:
My first thought when I heard about it was actually SimplexMetasys. In all reality though, the individual brand names probably won’t change much.
Yeah, I think the Grinnell name holds enough weight in the sprinkler industry that they’ll probably keep it along with Simplex.
I predict the merger will be similar to Honeywell’s acquisition of Pittway, where all brands are kept and operate semi-autonomously.
I think the only thing that’ll change is the name before SimplexGrinnell, i.e.: Tyco SimplexGrinnell will become JohnsonControls SimplexGrinnell.
Johnson Controls is a much more recognizable name in the industry imo, probably a lot larger company too.
i know a few people at simplex and it was obvious something was going on with all the internal restructuring they’ve been doing. JCI is a huge controls company and tyco is a huge fire & security company, so it was just a matter of time before they merged. all of the other major controls and fire alarm companies have already done it.
Simplex’s agreement with AD* after the split also recently ended, so those two will be competitors in a lot of markets again.
The big issues with these mergers is the other partnerships you gotta squash. Since Simplex did fire it has a lot of partners with controls companies that it’s now going to be direct competitors with. Tyco’s security side has relied almost purely on integrators which they will now be direct competitors with unless the same seperation is kept that they had between them and Simplex at Tyco. JCI is definitely in a position to inadvertently kneecap some of their new companies if they play it wrong (but I doubt they will). Simplex will be just fine for sure, but the name might eventually go away.
Sometimes buying other companies doesn’t make sense, especially with security. Tyco did Sensormatic no favors when they bought them, and UTC has all but killed GE Security. It’ll be interesting to see the impact 10 years down the road.
The thing with this merger is that there isn’t a lot of brand overlap. When Johnson Controls did fire alarm stuff, for example, they just rebranded Honeywell stuff and used either Honeywell or Wheelock NAs. The stuff they did in-house can be merged with Simplex pretty seamlessly. As previously stated, how many of the fire companies aren’t part of a larger controls company nowadays? Siemens, Mircom and Honeywell do some of everything and EST is part of UTC. These 4 plus Simplex likely make up the vast majority of the North American market.
Honeywell is weird because they kept a lot of brands alive. How many fire alarm companies do they have selling very similar products? System Sensor has the NAs, but you have Notifier, Fire Lite, Silent Knight and Gamewell-FCI doing panels and initiating devices. You’d think that they’d combine a couple to save money.
JohnsonTycoSimplexGrinell Controls 4100 and JohnsonTycoSimplexGrinell Truealerts and T-Bars. :lol:
JCI is roughly twice the size as Tyco, but it does look like Tyco has a lot bigger profit margin. Some companies keep the old brand, some slowly eat them up, time will tell.
what seems really popular these days is rebranding the main lines but keeping the old name around for other sales outlets. simplex is kind of unique in that they have no dealers, but tyco security is pretty much 100% based on dealers.
Blame Obama.
Does anyone know what the status of this merger is with respect to Notifier(Honeywell). Will Notifier be taking over the existing Johnson Control Fire Line since they manufacture the panels?
It was to my understanding that a decision was suppose to be made by April 1st with respect to the existing Johnson Control panel line that was manufactured by Honeywell/Notifier. Will current Notifier distributors take over these accounts?
it doesn’t matter what notifier wants to do, johnson will keep their existing customers. service may get a bit trickier if notifier won’t sell them parts anymore, but they’ll make do. they can still service the systems, and can easily hire a notifier distributor for small work.
johnson is a controls company, they put in fire alarm when needed but would be fine if they never ever had to deal with it in the first place, and the controls contract is 10x whatever the fire is. this means johnsons customers want them for their controls, so nobody is going to easily be taking the fire portion away from them, they’re just too embedded with those customers on the controls side already. there’s a good chance you even start to see notifier panels replaced with simplex, although the reality is it’ll take years for those two companies to become fully integrated.
that’s all purely my speculation. if notifier does drop JCI and you’re a distributor, your best bet is to call up JCI and get in their good graces and offer your services directly to them, not their customers.
I am not a fan of Simplex/Grinnell based on past experience.
2016 or 2015? Because it was widely known by the end of 2015 to most people and we were guessing it way before then with the way Simplex was restructuring all of a sudden.