Unisys Corp. receives letter from MMI Investments

MMI Investments, third-largest shareholder of Unisys Corp., wants it to consider selling or spinning off its U.S. government contracting business in an initial public offering.

Photo: Unisys Corp. receives letter from MMI Investments

MMI sent a letter to the information technology company's board of directors on Jan. 7. The letter said that Unisys was overshadowing "the highly-valuable U.S. government business" and that MMI is "mystified by management and the board's inaction in the face of Unisys' ruinous stock price performance over the past year," Bizjournals says.

Unisys Corporation, based in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a global provider of information technology services and solutions.

Paralleling larger trends in the U.S. information technology industry, an increasing amount of Unisys revenue comes from services rather than equipment sales. In 2006, the ratio was 83% for services, up from 65% in 1997. 

Unisys clients are typically large corporations or government agencies, and have included Washington Mutual, the New York Clearinghouse, Dell, Lufthansa Systems, Lloyds TSB, EMC, SWIFT, various state governments (for services such as unemployment insurance, licensing, etc.), various branches of the U.S. military, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), numerous airports, the General Services Administration, U.S. Transportation Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Nextel, and Telefonica of Spain.

Unisys systems are used for many industrial and government purposes, including banking, check processing, income tax processing, airline passenger reservations, biometric identification, newspaper content management and shipping port management, as well as providing weather data services. Unisys operates the world's largest RFID network for the U.S. military, tracking 9 million containers yearly to 1,500 nodes in 25 countries. It also created the universal identification card for citizens of South Africa .

The company engages in consulting, one-time contract jobs, and contracts for ongoing outsourced IT services. Services include building and integrating hardware and software systems, providing ongoing hosting and management of data, planning operational processes and changes, and providing security.

Source: agencies