At one point they were a pretty well respected company and then they ran into the same issue that most conglomerates run into in that different parts of their business get different multiples and that often leads investors to give them the multiple of the lowest yielding portion of their business.
To help boost their stock price in the early 2010's they started to fudge their books and were caught and fined in the mid 2010's, I think it was over $6B in fines to indicate just how far they went to fudge their numbers.
After this they had alot of interest from activist investors as nothing attracts an activist investor like an old bumbling conglomerate. Its literally the typical hedge fund target/playbook.
- old company that has lost its way
- scandals affecting the companies books
- conglomerate that can be broken up and sold for pieces to unlock higher multiples in the market.
Now, instead of the activist hedge fund treatment, it will get the private equity treatment, where they'll break the company up but keep the name and spin the company back out in 5-10 years once they've sold off the divisions that can quickly make the investors money.
in the end the market determined that the activists were right and the company was way to big and diversified to be effective.
Sadly instead of the public benefiting from this breakup due to a bump in the share price and dividends being paid out from the breakup it will be a consortium of banks and other companies that benefit from this.