Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Two Point Four Shares and a Second-Largest Drug Book

People treat Bristol Myers Squibb as a New York drug house that always printed BMY.

The 1989 ticker is a merger leftover.

On 27 July 1989 Bristol-Myers Co. and Squibb Corp. said their boards had approved a stock-for-stock combination.

Squibb would merge into Bristol-Myers at 2.4 Bristol-Myers common shares for each Squibb share.

UPI that day recorded about 288.1 million Bristol-Myers shares and about 97 million Squibb shares outstanding.

Based on the prior New York close, the companies put the combined market value at 27 billion dollars in 1989 currency.

The Washington Post the next morning called the announced transaction 11.35 billion dollars.

Squibb's September proxy set a shareholder vote for 3 October 1989.

A New York Times report dated 4 October 1989 said shareholders of both companies had approved the combination and that the merger takes effect that Wednesday.

The new Bristol-Myers Squibb Company would be based in New York.

Combined 1988 revenues were given as 8.6 billion dollars in 1988 currency, second only to Merck.

The mechanism is a listed consumer-and-oncology house absorbing a hypertension specialist without a new cash offering.

Squibb holders became Bristol-Myers holders.

The tape kept the acquirer's listing and later shortened the name on the same Big Board line.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where both names already printed. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.