DowDuPont(DWDP) celebrates its last trading day intact today. After the bell, it will spin off Dow(DOW), and on June 1, it will spin off its agriscience business as Corteva. Shareholders will receive one share of Dow stock tonight for every three shares of DowDuPont stock owned. It has been a complicated road to get here. CEO Ed Breen… Read More »
A title pairing Robert Zimmerman and Madonna Louise Ciccone- too much? No matter, we’re having fun. DowDuPont(DWDP) is as well, with two spins coming up, the first in just weeks. It was just 36 months ago that Dow and DuPont announced their merger, and just 18 months ago when it closed. All along, they intended to split into… Read More »
Over 18 months since announcing plans to merge, Dow Chemical(DOW) and E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Co.(DD) will complete their merger on August 31. The new company will be named DowDuPont and will trade under the new DWDP ticker. DowDuPont will be included in both the S&P 100 and S&P 500, as were both predecessor companies. Don’t… Read More »
It’s been a rough year for Akzo Nobel(AKZOY). First, Elliott Management got involved. The activist fund was pushing for a breakup of the Dutch chemicals company. However, when US rival PPG(PPG) showed up with an offer to buy the whole company, Elliott began pushing the offer over management’s resistance. AkzoNobel was successfully able to leverage Dutch protectionism to… Read More »
Grab a tissue and say farewell to the Tyco (TYC) name. The former high flying conglomerate has a complicated history full of acquisitions (lots of those), strategy shifts, scandal ($6,000 shower curtains!) and of course, a lot of spinoffs. Current DuPont (DD) CEO Ed Breen smashed the company apart not once, but twice, creating three entities in both… Read More »
Wall Street loves spinoffs, but these transactions are hardly simple affairs to execute. There is a reason most of them take more than 9 months to consummate. After pushing off the expected completion date of Ingevity’s spinoff again, it seems WestRock (WRK) is learning that fact the hard way. The specialty chemical spinoff is now expected to be… Read More »
Yahoo (YHOO) had a tough year in 2015. The core business continued declining, key employees fled and its plans to deliver shareholder value by spinning off its Alibaba (BABA) stake into a standalone company was effectively derailed by the IRS. Unfortunately for the company and its beleaguered CEO Marissa Meyer, the start of 2016 isn’t looking much better… Read More »
A few short hits for a December Friday: By now, everyone has read about the proposed ‘mega merger of equals’ between Dow Chemical (DOW) and DuPont (DD) and the subsequent breakup into three separate companies (agriculture, specialty products and materials). One question worth pondering is how does it actually avoid the tax man? It sure seems like a… Read More »
Last week, Dow Chemical(DOW) and DuPont(DD) announced a massive merger. We had reported earlier in the week on chatter about the potential deal, and the outlines of the final deal were pretty much as described. The $130 billion merger will briefly create a company that had a combined $83 billion in revenue last year. The company will, however,… Read More »
The WSJ is reporting that Dow Chemical (DOW) and DuPont (DD) are in advanced merger talks to create a chemical behemoth with leading positions across the chemical spectrum including ag, plastics and a host of other markets. Both companies have been shedding non-core and non-performing assets over the past few years, including some via spinoffs and exchange offers.… Read More »
Despite what appeared to be reasonable improvement in the first quarter since its spinoff from DuPont(DD), The Chemours Company(CC) stock has continued its downward spiral. The company which began when-issued trading at $21 in late June, closed at $6.43 yesterday. As we have discussed previously, the company is burdened with $4 billion in debt, plus unknowable environmental liability.… Read More »
A few small hits for a tough New York Thursday (at least for us Mets fans): Era Group (ERA), the helicopter focused spinoff from Seacor (CKH), got hit hard this week on news that Petrobras (PBR) was dropping its helicopter transport services. With falling oil prices and the company under intense scrutiny amidst a seemingly ever growing corruption scandal,… Read More »
A few short hits for the end of the week… The WSJ busted out an activist report card analyzing the results of ‘what happens to large U.S. companies after an activist arrives’. Naturally, the outcome is ‘mixed’. That said, it’s certainly an interesting data set to parse through and one is able to sort by activist or by… Read More »
It’s a summer Friday – here are a few links for your enjoyment: 1) Gannett (GCI) recently transformed itself via spinoff (the parent company changed its name to TEGNA(TGNA)) into a print focused business. New CEO Robert Dickey is tasked with building a business in a market that is facing severe secular headwinds. So what is the plan?… Read More »
One of the attractions of spinoffs is that they tend to be underfollowed companies out of the gate. Of course, that isn’t always the case and DuPont’s (DD) recent Chemours (CC) spin has sure gotten plenty of attention although most of it hasn’t been so great. Wall Street’s opinions started rolling in about a week prior to the… Read More »