From the Tuesday Wall Street Journal

http://www.landroverusa.com/us/en/Vehicles/home.htm

Also, Boeing is buying aviation parts supplier Aviall...

Boeing to Buy Parts Firm Aviall
Deal for $1.7 Billion
Is First Big Purchase For CEO McNerney
By DENNIS K. BERMAN and J. LYNN LUNSFORD
May 2, 2006
Boeing Co. said it agreed to purchase aviation parts and services
company Aviall Inc. for about $1.7 billion, marking the first big
acquisition for Boeing Chairman, President and Chief Executive Jim
McNerney.
The Chicago plane maker said it would pay Aviall stockholders $48 a
share in cash, a 27% premium to Aviall's closing price of $37.70 Friday
on the New York Stock Exchange. Yesterday morning, the stock was up 25%,
or $9.31, at $47.01.
Aviall, based in Dallas, straddles some important territory in the
aerospace industry, serving as a major independent parts distributor and
provider of related services for both commercial and military aviation.
It also operates an electronic marketplace where aviation and other
transport industries trade parts and services. It reported net income
last year of $56.5 million, up 31% from 2004, on revenue of $1.3 billion.
"The aviation-services market offers us tremendous opportunities to
profitably grow our business, internally and externally, to better serve
our commercial and military customers," Mr. McNerney said.
One of the most attractive aspects of Aviall's business is its complex
network of suppliers and customers, all of which can link together
online through Aviall to order spare parts as needed, enabling customers
to avoid stockpiling expensive spare-parts inventories.
For Boeing, it marks the company's largest purchase since the late
1990s, when it made several large aerospace deals, including the $29
billion acquisition of McDonnell Douglas Corp. The company has cut a
relatively cautious M&A path since then, disposing of more assets than
it has accumulated while working to focus more on the design and final
assembly of planes and weapons.
Boeing has ridden the recent resurgence in the commercial-aviation
sector. Its share price has nearly doubled since the beginning of 2004;
in Big Board trading yesterday morning, it was down 50 cents at $82.95.
Aviall will report through the company's commercial-airplanes unit's
Commercial Aviation Services segment, which is led by Lou Mancini, a
former executive at UAL Corp.'s United Airlines. This business segment
has been working in recent years to expand its relationship customers,
including setting up a 24-hour operations center outside Seattle aimed
at speeding up the delivery of spare parts to airplanes that experience
problems between scheduled maintenance stops.
Last year, Boeing brought in roughly $9 billion in sales from selling
spare parts and related services, making it one of Boeing's
fastest-growing sources of revenue. The Aviall acquisition would bring
the total amount of revenue from those activities to around $11 billion
this year, according to people familiar with the situation.
This type of deal is one that Mr. McNerney said he would be on the
lookout for when he took over as CEO in July. At the time, he said he
wasn't interested in doing any blockbuster deals soon, but he said he
wouldn't hesitate to make an acquisition "if it makes sense." In March,
Mr. McNerney promoted Shephard W. Hill, who headed business development
for the company's defense and space unit, to the newly created position
of senior vice president for business development and strategy at the
company's main offices in Chicago. Mr. McNerney said at the time that
Mr. Hill's job was to be "focused solely on our forward-looking efforts."
One of Mr. McNerney's top priorities for squeezing more efficiency out
of an aerospace titan that already brings in more than $1 billion a week
in revenue is to take advantage of the size and buying power of both the
commercial-airplanes and defense operations whenever possible. Aviall's
parts-distribution business is about 60% commercial aviation and 40%
military.
Write to Dennis K. Berman at and J. Lynn Lunsford
at