Westinghouse May Sell Refrigerator Unit To Help Cbs

Westinghouse Electric Corp. is close to selling its Thermo King unit for about $2.5 billion, people familiar with the situation said.

Negotiations are likely to last through the weekend, they said. An announcement of the refrigerator unit’s sale is expected as soon as Monday.

Analysts cited General Electric Co., York International Corp., Emerson Electric Co. and Mitsubishi Corp. as possible buyers, though people familiar with the transaction said they aren’t interested. Westinghouse declined to comment on the sale.

“Thermo King has such a large market share and some pretty good margins and returns,” said Schroder & Co. analyst David Pizzimenti. It had $180 million in operating profit last year on sales of $1.01 billion -about a quarter of the total revenue from Westinghouse’s industrial business.

Westinghouse is selling Thermo King as it prepares to split its media business from its industrial operations later this year. It plans to use proceeds from the sale to help finance its money-losing CBS broadcasting business. Westinghouse bought CBS for $5.4 billion in 1995.

Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse shares closed unchanged at $25.43-3/4 in U.S. composite trading.

“This is a good thing,” said Phil Schettewi, a managing partner at Loomis, Sayles & Co. and owner of about 6 million Westinghouse shares. “It will really help CBS clean up their balance sheet and move forward.”

Thermo King is the largest manufacturer of mobile refrigerators for trucks and trains. United Technologies Corp.’s Carrier Transicold unit is its biggest competitor.

Refrigerator trucks are a growth business, said Kemp Fuller, an analyst at National Securities Corp. “There are so many parts of the world that do not have mobile refrigeration,” he said. “The full global opportunity has not yet been captured by Thermo King.”

Westinghouse probably will use proceeds from the sale to help reduce CBS’s $6.5 billion debt and $1 billion in pension liabilities, analysts said.

Under the terms of the split, CBS will receive $1.4 billion of Westinghouse’s tax-loss carry-forwards, which allow it to reduce federal taxes. In return, CBS will assume more than $2 billion in pension and post-retirement obligations of the industrial businesses.

After Thermo King is sold, Westinghouse’s remaining industrial units will focus almost entirely on electric and nuclear-power generation. It will have positive cash flow immediately after the split and no debt.

Some of the stocks that moved substantially or traded heavily Friday on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market.

NYSE

Motorola, up 3-5/16 at 69-3/16.

The stock started to recover after sliding more than 8 points late Thursday on news that Motorola expects to report disappointing third-quarter earnings because of weak pager sales and the decision to stop making Macintosh clones.

Waters, up 6-7/16 at 40-7/16.

The Milford, Mass.-based company announced late Thursday that it was buying Micromass Ltd. of England for $178 million, primarily in cash. Micromass makes mass spectrometry instruments.

Manpower, down 3-13/16 at 37-1/2.

The Milwaukee-based provider of temporary staffing services warned that third-quarter earnings will come in below Wall Street projections.

NASDAQ

Ariel, up 1-1/2 at 9.

The Cranbury, N.J.-based developer of remote-access data solutions signed a five-year cooperative development and licensing agreement with Texas Instruments.

Cymer, down 3-1/8 at 30-1/4.

The San Diego-based company disputed reports that flaws in its lasers have slowed Nikon’s efforts to ship semiconductor production equipment to chip makers.