Yesterday, I wrote about the stock market value that can be created by separating multi-line companies into their components.
Today, the real world counterpart in value creation–the ugly duckling.
the ugly duckling…
Many times the top managers of company ABC come mostly or entirely from A and B. As a result, they typically don’t understand C. In many cases, they don’t care to put in the effort to figure out how C works, especially if C is significantly smaller than A or B.
Because of the perception that C “doesn’t fit” in ABC, it may be starved of the capital it needs to expand. Because it’s small it may be perceived as not worth the trouble or to be incapable of moving the profit needle significantly no matter what it does. No matter what its standalone prospects, it may be run simply to generate cash for the rest of the company.
Management of C will likely be poorly paid by industry standards, because of this perception. A significant portion of that compensation will through stock options. Since C isn’t publicly traded, those options are doubtless on ABC stock. There’s very little the management of C can do to influence their value. More than that, if ABC is a mature firm these options may only accrue value slowly.
…can become a swan
If C is spun off, however, the hands of the management of C become untied as it gains control of an independent enterprise. Freed of the shackles of an unimaginative ABC corporate mindset, it can raise and use new capital to expand. It can change its corporate structure and focus. It can experiment.
Management will participate directly in the success of C both through higher salaries and by holding options on C’s stock. So it will probably be a lot more highly motivated to grow.
the Coach spinoff from Sara Lee
The spinoff of Coach(COH) by Sara Lee in 2000 in an offering that valued all of COH, now a $10 billion company, at $140 million is a prime example. At the time, Sara Lee said it wanted to spend its time managing larger brands like Sara Lee baked goods, Ball Park franks, Hanes underwear and Kiwi shoe polish.
The Sara Lee statement is telling. The businesses whose prospects it understood, and valued most highly, were low-priced, slow-growth, commodity-like consumer goods sold predominantly in retail outlets, like supermarkets, that Sara Lee did not control or run. Even before its amazing post-spinoff transformation, COH owned its own retail outlets and sold predominantly to women in families with income of $100,000. Not Sara Lee-like at all! COD’s biggest issue was that, because it had a very narrow range of leather products, customers only bought something new when the old one wore out, that is, every seven or eight years.
Sara Lee (SLE) no longer exists. It split itself in two, changed names and had both parts bought out within the past few years. That total buyout price was about $17 billion.
The earliest market capitalization figure for SLE that I can find is $14 billion at yearend 2002. By that time, COH, which went public in late 2000 had quadrupled in price and had a market cap of just over $500 million.