Corporate name changes increased by 4 percent in 1995 with mergers and acquisitions accounting for more than half of the switches, according to a survey released Wednesday.
The number of companies changing names rose to 1,153 from 1,114 in 1994, according to the annual survey by the corporate identity adviser Anspach Grossman Portugal Inc.Jim Johnson, president and chief executive of the firm, said the biggest share of the changes were in the financial, manufacturing, communications and health-care industries.
"It's no secret why. The current climate for mergers and acquisitions is as good if not better than it was in the past," he said in a statement.
It was the largest number of corporate name changes since the 1,285 switches in 1992. The record for name changes in the 26 years that the firm has tracked them was 1,864 in 1988, the year after the stock market crash.
Of the name changes this year, 602 were attributed to mergers and acquisitions - 53 percent of the total. An additional 307, or 27 percent, resulted from an effort to portray a new corporate image.
Among companies whose names changed because they were acquired were Kidder Peabody & Co., acquired by PaineWebber Group Inc., and Shawmut National Corp., which became part of Fleet Financial Group Inc.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. was the name that resulted from the merger of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Pacific railroad companies.
Companies that adopted new names to convey a new focus or direction included Finova Capital, formerly Greyhound Financial; PCS Phosphate, formerly Texas-Gulf; and Frontier Corp., formerly Rochester Telephone.