https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/business/dupont-de-nemours-company-split/index.html
DuPont de Nemours, the American multinational chemical company which traces its history back to 1802, announced plans to split into three publicly traded companies.
I would wager that one of the companies is going to hold all of their products that are liabilities that they expect huge lawsuits from.
Monsanto has done the same in the past.
First thing I thought of.
Let’s not forget Bayer doing the same to make it impossible to prosecute them for infecting thousands of people with HIV and Hepatitis intentionally.
Absolutely, they are preemptively limiting exposure to something they expect to be a problem in the near future.
The company plans to spin off its electronics and water businesses into their own yet-to-be-named companies
This is the second DuPont breakup in half a decade. In 2019, DowDuPont, which was created in a DuPont merger with Dow Chemical, broke apart into three separate entities: DuPont, Dow Chemical and Corteva, the company’s agriculture business.
On Wednesday, DuPont said the newly formed electronics company would focus on “semiconductor solutions and advanced electronics products,” while the new water company would be “a comprehensive water solutions provider.” The leftover divisions will remain as part of DuPont.
I wonder if this is the harbinger of a bunch of companies breaking up after decades of consolidation.
It would definitely be good to have a big round of breakups to get competition going again. Then we just have to fight against the consolidation that will start up in 20-30 years.
I wonder if this is the harbinger of a bunch of companies breaking up after decades of consolidation.
It isn't consolidation, per se.
A lot of these older industrial companies had R&D tied to their businesses that would come up with random new product lines that could go from consumer goods to heavy industrial purposes. At that time, these companies would create new divisions to sell the new products.
Over time, the different product lines became more specialized and R&D for one division wasn't helping other divisions like it used to. At that point, you would have a holding company effectively manage several wildly different companies that just happened to share some base technology.
At that point, it made more sense to break up these companies since the synergy for keeping these companies under one corporate board was lost and the management issues became too high.
Metaphorically, it seems like an animal chewing its own foot off, when trying to escape a trap.
Gives off vibes like its trying to protect the rest of itself, especially after so many years of being a monolithic company.
The company plans to spin off its electronics and water businesses into their own yet-to-be-named companies