Marriages of Necessity

In its economic struggle, Britain's Labor Government for months has been urging various competing companies to unite in bigger and more efficient combines. It has met with considerable success. Some recent nuptials:

P: Leyland Motor Corp., the Commonwealth's largest producer of heavy trucks, last week made an apparently successful $70-million bid to buy the Rover Co., whose Land Rover sales have been hit by Japanese competition. With 70,000 employees and $840-million-a-year revenue from 10% of the passenger-car and 25% of the commercial-vehicle markets, Leyland-Rover would become Britain's No. 3 automak er, after British Motor Corp. and Ford. Though the marriage seems to be one of necessity. Leyland Chairman Sir William Black says that Rover has been "a glint in our eye for a long time."

P: Thorn Electrical Industries, Britain's largest maker of radio and television sets, outbid Dutch interests by offering $74.8 million for ailing Pye of Cambridge, sixth-ranking TV-set producer, which lost $25 million last year. Austrian-born Sir Jules Thorn, 62, built Thorn up from a mite to a mammoth (fiscal 1966 sales: $238 million) by breaking a light-bulb monopoly in the '30s. Later, he expanded by absorbing such competitors as Marconi, British Philco, and Ultra Radio and Television. Through Pye, Thorn hopes to move into telecommunications, now dominated in Britain by the likes of Plessey and General Electric (which has no connection with the U.S. company of the same name).

P: Three major steel companies--Dorman Long, South Durham Steel and Iron, and Stewarts and Lloyds--agreed to fuse into a group that will rival the new steel titans on the Continent, be capable of producing a quarter of Britain's steel needs. The merger was prompted by the demand for pipe created by newly found North Sea gas. Short of pipe capacity, Stewarts and Lloyds and South Durham plan to use Dorman Long's new plate plant at Lackenby as a source of supply. Since that is just the kind of resource pooling that the nationalization-bent government has been demanding of the steel industry, the merger won a quick official blessing.

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