That'll teach Honeywell (NYSE:HON) to release solid earnings and even raise expectations on a day when the market is reeling from its peers' moaning and groaning. On Friday, the company reported solid growth in each of its businesses and hewed to the high end of expectations for the year, only to be thumped by the market amid the cautionary news being doled out by other companies.

The New Jersey-based diversified technology and manufacturing company racked up net income of $618 million, or $0.81 per share, in the quarter ended in September, up from $541 million, or $0.66 a share, in the same quarter a year earlier. That, for you Fools keeping score, represents a 14.2% increase on the net income line and a 22.7% improvement in per-share earnings.

Honeywell's revenues were up 9.8% to $8.74 billion. Three of the company's four operating units -- aerospace, automation and control solutions, and transportation systems -- saw their revenues climb between 9% and 12%, while sales for the specialty materials segment were up 6%.

But despite those admirable results, the company's share price had 4% taken out of it on Friday by a market that wasn't taking any prisoners. Not to be thwarted, however, management raised earnings guidance to the top of its prior range. It now expects income to fall in a rather tight $3.14 to $3.16 range, about 25% above the 2006 level.

As was indicated by the most recent quarter, a meaningful portion of the expected per-share improvement will result from a lower average share count this year. That change is a result of the company having spent about $3.7 billion on share repurchases thus far in 2007.

Another big consideration for Honeywell investors involves its relative lack of exposure to the sorts of domestic softness that both Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) and Schlumberger (NYSE:SLB) noted in their releases and subsequent calls Friday. It's a trend that I'll be watching carefully as we hear from other big Honeywell competitors at midweek. But as Honeywell CEO David Cote noted on his conference call, while the company has been affected slightly by softness in the U.S. residential and automotive markets, "The exposure to those end markets for Honeywell is really not large."

So the market's rough treatment of Honeywell notwithstanding, the company may just be one of the few big global manufacturers to generally sidestep the effects of a soft U.S. economy. On that basis alone, the company appears to deserve careful Foolish monitoring.

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