$3.8-Billion Henley Group Will Make La Jolla Its Headquarters

The Henley Group, the $3.8-billion-in-assets spinoff of Allied-Signal, said Wednesday that it will relocate its headquarters from a small suite of offices in New York to an 87,000-square-foot, Spanish-style building in La Jolla that once served as corporate headquarters of the Signal Cos.

Henley, with 35 subsidiaries formerly under the Allied-Signal fold, will house about 40 executives at the La Jolla facility.

The company employs about 22,000 people at 200 locations around the world, and, with $3.2 billion in pro forma sales last year, will rank as the largest publicly held company in San Diego.

Previously, the Price Co., with $2 billion in sales for the nine months ended June 8, was the largest San Diego-based public company.

The move to San Diego was not surprising. Henley Chairman and Chief Executive Michael D. Dingman has a home in La Jolla, is active in several San Diego civic organizations and has previously hinted that the company might eventually be based here.

Eleven of Henley’s 19 managing directors responsible for the company’s general management, financial management, legal affairs, risk management and human resources have previously been based in the La Jolla facility, according to Henley spokesman Norman Ritter.

Henley will keep the small suite of offices in midtown Manhattan that have served as its corporate headquarters since its spinoff from Allied-Signal late last year, Ritter said. Henley has been based in New York because there was a “great deal of work to be done with the financial community” there, he added.

Henley went public in May with what analysts said was the largest initial stock offering ever; the company raised $1.3 billion, more than six times its goal.

Henley has $1.1 billion in cash and equivalents, stockholders’ equity of $3.8 billion and “low debt and significant borrowing capacity,” according to the company.

Based on the equity figure, Henley would rank 33rd in the 1986 Fortune magazine listing of the 500 largest U.S. industrial corporations, officials of the company said.

The company’s Fisher Scientific Group also shares headquarters space at the La Jolla facility and with more than a dozen Allied-Signal executives, headed by Vice Chairman Forrest N. Shumway, formerly chairman of Signal before its merger last year with Allied Corp.

Before the Henley spinoff, Dingman was president of Allied-Signal. Before that, he was president of Signal and chief executive of Wheelabrator-Frye before its 1983 merger with Signal.