This site took a lengthy hiatus after Covid struck leaving our tables of ‘Upcoming’ and ‘Recent’ Spinoffs quite stale. I am sure this has been quite the disappointment to our readers and we do hate to disappoint! As we slowly turn the engines back on here, we will try to clean up the tables and fill in the ‘gaps’ in addition to covering new and upcoming spinoffs.
Here are three situations that used to be in the ‘Upcoming Spinoffs’ page to kick us off:
- TiVo announced in 2019 that it would be spinning off its products business. Shortly thereafter, the company merged with Xperi (XPER) ‘forming a unique digital entertainment technology platform and one of the industry’s largest and most diverse intellectual property (IP) licensing platforms.’ A spinoff did ultimately get done though in October 2022 with Xperi itself being spun off from the newly renamed parent company Adeia (ADEA). This transaction essentially completed the products and IP separation originally envisioned by TiVo. It must have been fate.
- Nielsen Holdings was planning on spinning off Nielsen Global Connect in 2021, but the unit was sold to Advent International for $2.7B in November 2020 instead. Interestingly, Nielsen itself was subsequently bought for $16B(!) in 2022 by private equity firm Evergreen (and some others). It’s not unusual to see proposed spinoffs acquired because the announcement makes it known to the market that the unit is no longer ‘core’. It’s also common for newly slimmed down and focused companies to be acquired.
- Merck (MRK) completed the spinoff of its woman’s health division Organon & Co (OGN) on June 2, 2021. Shareholders should have received just 1/10th of a share of Organon for every Merck share owned. The spin was ‘expected to allow Merck to increase its focus on key growth pillars, achieve higher revenue and EPS growth rates and enable incremental operating efficiencies of approximately $1.5 billion’. Merck also got a $9B distribution from Organon. No surprise then that Organon has been almost cut in half since its spin while Merck has had a nice run.
We will continue cleaning up the table over these next few weeks, but please feel free to drop us a line pointing out any spins we may have missed!
Disclosure: Author holds no position in any stock mentioned.