I really love it when pieces ultimately fit together neatly.

Take the case of Monday's announcement of a merger between Fisher Scientific (NYSE:FSH) and Thermo Electron (NYSE:TMO). The deal essentially valued Fisher at $78.90 a share -- $0.90 more than my fair-value estimate of the company. Nifty, huh?

Even though there is a little strangeness to this deal, it makes a lot of sense. The strangeness comes from the fact that Thermo Electron is buying Fisher, even though Fisher is about 50% larger than Thermo Electron and Fisher shareholders will ultimately own more than 60% of the combined company (Fisher shareholders are getting two shares of Thermo stock for each share they own).

What makes sense, though, is that this creates a large end-to-end supplier of equipment and consumables/disposables for the health-care and biological research markets. This is an industry where many of the leaders have to supplement single-digit organic growth with acquisitions, and I imagine the cost benefits from scale and greater efficiency will make a difference on the bottom line.

If you're Waters (NYSE:WAT), Applied Biosystems (NYSE:ABI), or PerkinElmer (NYSE:PKI), I don't think you're really loving this news. After all, two formidable competitors combining into one is usually not good news for the rest of the crowd. But who knows, maybe there will be customer disruptions, and maybe this signals the beginning of a wave of large-scale mergers and acquisitions in the sector (as opposed to the recent history of big companies buying baskets of little companies).

I'm always a little skeptical when two companies combine and promise big-time changes in terms of adding to earnings, synergies, and so on. So I personally wouldn't be tumbling into Thermo Electron stock just yet. That said, I can see how this combination could be a powerful one and I can't overlook one little detail: Thermo Electron management will be running the new company, and it has managed to generate better returns on capital than Fisher. Not great returns, mind you, but better.

If this combination somehow allows management to generate double-digit returns on that capital base, it would certainly be a deal well worth its costs. In the meantime, Thermo Electron shareholders can at least be pleased to know that their shares are being diluted in a deal that looks to be worth more than just a handful of magic beans.

Fool contributor Stephen Simpson has no financial interest in any stocks mentioned (that means he's neither long nor short the shares).