But the dead weight is a company too. Does everyone who ends up working there just sort of accept that now they work at a company with worse financials and prospects?
Edit: All the replies are fantastic. Thank you.
But the dead weight is a company too. Does everyone who ends up working there just sort of accept that now they work at a company with worse financials and prospects?
Edit: All the replies are fantastic. Thank you.
Companies split when two halves just have such vastly different objectives and futures that, at an organizational practical sense, it no longer makes sense for the same board/CEO/management to be running them together.
Splitting them up lets both halves select boards/CEOs/management that is best for them, and pursue strategies that are best separately. The "underperforming" segment may now perform better now that it's free to use AWS/Azure/Google cloud tools instead of just IBM's... it can enter into strategic alliances it couldn't before... it can merge with another company that wouldn't have made sense before.
As for the people who work there... they're still employed so nothing really changes day-to-day.
But the main point is that this frees the "worse part", if you still want to call it that, to do what is best for it. It may very well turn out to thrive and be a huge success. It's still a normal business like any other.
If it were truly dead weight it wouldn't be spun off -- it would be shut down and everyone would be laid off. The fact it's being spun off or split means it's expected to be a viable business on its own. Nobody can predict the future -- who knows, it might outperform the cloud part long-term.
The contrary point of view is that this means that either:
1. crapIBM will need to pay betterIBM for access to continue using the ERP, QRadar, Remedy, licenses, etc tools they use today. This is better for betterIBM and worse for crapIBM
2. crapIBM will need to stop using betterIBM's tools, and have to quickly negotiate new licenses/tools and spend 6+ months of their first fiscal year just moving platforms (moving SAP has often been a 2 year failed IT challenge, good luck). This will make crapIBM continue to look worse, making betterIBM's leadership look good for divesting themselves of it.
A big point of splitting up is so that (in both directions, to the extent that it applies) cross-unit costs aren't baked into operations. Subsidies like you suggest directly undermine that.
Those aren't actually spinoffs in the sense of what IBM is doing; "Google" was effectively just renamed "Alphabet", with its core business in a new subunit called "Google". They are all still within the same corporate ownership structure. Its an internal organizational change, not a separation into separately-owned organizations.
A “spin-off” within a common corporate umbrella is a different thing done for different reasons than a corporate divorce kind of spin-off like IBM is doing.
[1] https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/blog/intangibles-tax-risks-opportu...
[2] https://prospect.org/economy/decisive-tax-defeat-for-the-mul...
Like: We'll give you an 80% discount in the first quarter, and the discount goes down by 20% per quarter, eventually you'll either be negotiating your contracts with us like any other potential customer, or you'll have moved off to some other platform.
Every holding has transfer pricing [1] as BAU, and I can assume that it is also the case for IBM
It's in nobody's interest for "betterIBM" to succeed at the greater expense of "crapIBM". With so much shared ownership (at least in the medium-term, practically speaking), shareholders want both to succeed.
That's the whole point -- shareholders think both halves will do better as separate entities, and it's in nobody's interest for one half to exploit the other.
Surely your "crapIBM" will continue to have access to "betterIBM"'s tools at a reasonable price, but they'll also be free to migrate to better ones, as they choose, at the pace that is most profitable for them.
It's win-win because that's the entire point of the split in the first place. The two resulting entities aren't even competing with each other, they're in totally different markets.
The book How to be a Stock Market Genius covers situations like this and gives some tools to analyze them if you are interested in learning more about it.
The "Cloud/AI" group wants to sell the new buzzword products.
The "Infrastructure Group" wants to sell the low innovation commoditized services and products.
The sales people from both groups would be telling opposite stories on why you should go with them for your IT needs. So it is easier to split them up and let them compete in the market rather than compete internally . And it probably makes both markets bigger in the long run because they can focus and expand.
I'm not saying that these all are necessarily true here. Time will tell. And about the people, if the culture was bad before it would stay the same regardless. If it takes a turn for worse, then I guess it was inevitable either way.
After all, complaining about the state of the world decaying goes back to at least the ancient Greeks.
Nice to meet you again, mail in profile.
Apparently, both didn't say this : https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/01/misbehave/
There are distinct, often contradictory interests. Each half figures it's the other one dragging them down, which might be true completely, partially, or not at all. And it's clear who has their head in the clouds in this case ;)
> But the dead weight is a company too. Does everyone who ends up working there just sort of accept that now they work at a company with worse financials and prospects?
I was on the HPE side - pretty much! This typically doesn't come as a surprise, though. The free swag with the new company logo makes it a little better, though.
But many people at the time thought Agilent was more in line with traditional HP values than HP was, and over the long run, they appear to have performed better than HP.
IBM has done this before. They sold personal computer business to Leonovo in 2005.
If you're in the under-performing division, you already know. You've already accepted that you work there. You feel it in your bones.
As someone who used to do a bit of recreational "special situations" investing, I can say with some confidence that counterintuitively the worse part is often the better part, and the "dead weight" often soars after it is jettisoned vs the "good part" flatlining. Not always but it can definitely happen.
The reason for this is logically apparent when you think about the second-order effect of people's opinions on a stock valuation. Say IBM has two halves: "Cloud IBM" which is funky and "Boring IBM" which is everything else. As one company the valuation is the weighted average of everything everyone thinks about the funky part and the boring part put together and is therefore fairly boring overall.
So when you do a spinoff the funky cloud part should soar, right? Wrong. Or not always, anyway.
What often happens when you split a business into a good part and a "bad" part is that all the overinflated expectations of investors are concentrated in the funky part so at the time of the split it has a very high valuation and the boring part is massively oversold and undervalued. So after the split the boring part performs well even if it just phones it in because expectations are so low whereas the funky part needs to do amazingly just to meet the expectations of people who are already in the stock at a valuation that is too high.
Often, the “good” part is actually the high-risk, high-growth potential part and the “bad” part is the low-risk, solid returns part.
Fair to add that this doesn't refute the structural logic of seperating the parts - if your business has two halves that are that different, a split can make total sense.
The people working in the "lesser" part take a very close look at who the new management is, and what their market chances are. The most likely outcome here is "meh".
At that point, most career-hungry people who have contacts in the other side of the company start extending feelers, because it's better to be in a growth area than in a steady ship if you want to have quick career growth. The few who've also got contacts outside the industry weigh the rest of the industry for their prospects.
Meanwhile, middle management isn't stupid and knows this is happening. Large turf wars break out, everybody trying to secure the most interesting projects for their teams so they can attract the best remaining people. The resulting office politics drive most of the remaining people who have options outside to leave as well, because it's a cesspit.
At this point you have created a solidly mediocre company. It'll likely plod on for a long time, on a slow downward slope. Every calculates what comes first, implosion or retirement, and chooses accordingly.
Life is, for lack of a better word, solidly grey.
But sure, on paper it's a great opportunity for both sides.
I'm sorry you're caught in this :(
Chemours was loaded with "assets" like dangerous chemicals, and their accompanying lawsuits. (One phrase used in a later lawsuit was: "unlimited exposure for historical DuPont liabilities")
Chemours' market cap was initially valued at $3b and quickly crashed to $0.75b. But then Trump was elected, it started looking like the liability from dangerous chemicals would be less than previously believed, and eventually this company, which was designed to fail because of open-ended liabilities, was valued as high as $10b.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CC/chemours/market...
Yes, this is a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_bank
No reason any company can’t do it, not just banks