Danaher’s Directors Have the Business Experience Necessary to be Good Stewards of Company’s Impending Public Offering

The Washington, DC-based industrial conglomerate Danaher Corp announced today that it plans to make a public offering of $500 million of its senior notes that are due in 2018.  The company intends to allocate the proceeds from the proposed public offering to repay a portion of its outstanding commercial paper and for general corporate purposes, according to the company’s press release.

Merrill Lynch & Co, JP Morgan Securities Inc and UBS Securities LLC are acting as joint book-running managers, the company said.

Danaher manufactures professional instrumentation, medical technologies, industrial technologies and tools and components.  On Thursday morning, the company’s share price opened on the NYSE at $86.09 and was trading at $86.36 at 11:08am ET.  Late Wednesday, Danaher declared a quarterly dividend of 3 cents per share.

Since investors are likely to treat a public offering with skepticism if they believe the company’s Board of Directors are inexperienced, NewsVisual created an IntellectSpace Knowledge Map of Danaher’s Directors in order to determine their level of business experience and to evaluate the extent of their involvement in other businesses.

Several of the company’s Directors serve on other corporate boards.  The one with the most business involvement among them is Director Alan G. Spoon, whom the Knowledge Map shows to serve as a Director on several boards, including Getty Images, Inc, IAC/Interactive Corp, and TechTarget, Inc; as well as being a member on the Council of Foreign Relations, which often performs in-depth studies of global economic issues.

The Knowledge Map also illustrates that Director John T Schwieters, who has an almost equal level of business involvement, serves on the boards of Perseus LLC, Smithfield Foods Inc, and ManorCare Inc.  It’s also notable that Danaher President/CEO/Director H Lawrence Culp Jr. also serves on the board of GlaxoSmithKline Inc.

Finally, the Knowledge Map shows that Director Mortimer M Caplin is a Founding Partner with the law firm of Caplin & Drysdale and also serves on the board of Presidential Realty Corp.  It is also noteworthy that Director Caplin, who is now 90, was the U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.  In fact, he was on the cover of Time magazine on February 1, 1963.

(Note: the information contained and presented in Knowledge Maps is public information from the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States of America).

Click here or copy this link into your Internet Explorer browser for an interactive version of this IntellectSpace Knowledge Map: http://nv.intellectspace.com/ispace/GuestMonitor.aspx?id=2b37e7f1-1c1a-43de-b4e1-1f1dfd1c978e