Comment / Honeywell gives up on the warehouse and private equity is betting it shouldn’t have

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In a nutshell: The industrial conglomerate spent nearly $2bn assembling Intelligrated and Transnorm. A decade later, it’s handing them to a PE firm for an undisclosed price. The real question is what happens to the customers.

Honeywell’s decade-long experiment in warehouse automation ended last Thursday with a press release and a conspicuous blank space where the sale price should have been.

The shrinking, Charlotte-based conglomerate – which has been addressing its corporate tree via disposals and spin-offs in the ...