Honeywell gets out of the mobile hardware and scanning business
A few days ago, we posted Honeywell’s Q2 2026 financials. There were a few surprises. First, Honeywell, a company that’s essentially been treading water in overall sales since 2014 ($40 billion in 2014, $37 billion in 2025), and done actually worse given the 36% inflation since 2014, decided to split itself in roughly half. Mostly, it appears, because they felt that the two sides — aerospace and automation — were so different. So from now on, there’s Honeywell Aerospace and Honeywell Technologies. With Honeywell Technologies, including all the mobile hardware and scanning they’ve accumulated over the years.
Or so it seemed. However, when perusing the financials, it looked something wasn’t adding up. The listed sales on the Honeywell Technologies side for Q2 2026 seemed less than we expected them to be, given they reported that sales had increased compared to Q2 2025. That didn’t make sense.
So today, August 4, 2026, we saw a release that Honeywell has actually sold its Productivity Solutions and Services business to Brady Corporation, a company with roughly $1.4 billion in annual net sales that describes itself on LinkedIn as a “manufacturer and marketer of complete solutions that identify and protect people, products and places.” Brady was founded in 1914, is headquartered in Milwaukee, and employs about 5,700 people. Brady seems to be doing well, with their stock price rising from under $20 ten years ago to almost $100 today.
And now Brady Corporation purchased Honeywell’s mobile hardware and scanning business in an all-cash $1.4 billion transaction, potentially almost doubling its annual revenues, and adding about 3,000 staff in the process.
Hopefully that’s all good. I say “hopefully”, because historically acquisition and takeovers of mobile computing technology companies has rarely gone well. Zebra may be a rare exception, as they are doing well after their purchase of Motorola’s Enterprise business back in 2014.
What is sad is how Honeywell got to a point where they jettisoned their mobile tech and scanning business. That business hadn’t grown organically. Honeywell had bought Metrologic in 2008, EMS and LXE in 2011, Intermec in 2011, VoCollect in 2013, DataMax O’Neil in 2014, to name just a few. Those acquired companies brought a great wealth of expertise, innovation, patents, culture and name recognition to Honeywell. Which Honeywell did preciously little with. All those great pioneering companies simply vanished. Here at RuggedPCReview we had many close relationships with those companies. We analyzed and reviewed their products (several dozens of Intermec alone).
All seemed to vanish into a black hole. We never heard from Honeywell at all. Not that we ever hear much from Zebra either. But Honeywell, especially, seemed to have zero interest in spreading the word of all the mobile tech they had bought, and now sold off at likely much less than what they paid for.
All of that tech, or what’s left of it, will now live on as Brady Intelligent Productivity Solutions. Let’s hope Brady Corporation will do a better job than Honeywell did.