Word: spin-off
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like most market crazes, this one started in the U.S. Sales and spin-offs accounted for 35% of M and A activity on Wall Street last year, up from 21% in 2000. Companies like Tyco International and Citigroup are jettisoning divisions; others, including GE, the Hilton Group and Motorola, are expected to offload units soon. In Europe, the market is smaller, but it's growing exponentially. According to J.P. Morgan, sales and spin-offs represented 8.2% of pan-European M and A activity last year, up from 2.8% in 1999. In the same period, Europe's entire...
...sale, especially if there's enough interest to create an auction - and get a premium price. But buyers are not always available in slow economic times, and some divisions are not appealing to anyone. "If you can't sell it or if it is very large, you do a spin-off," says Paul Gibbs, head of M and A research at J.P. Morgan in London. A spin-off is essentially giving a unit to shareholders. But because spin-offs are tax-free transactions in most European countries, they can pack benefits for shareholders and companies alike. Kingfisher even managed...
Minichiello of Spin-off Advisors says carve-outs enable parent companies to establish a division's market value, a particularly useful exercise if they plan to bail out of it altogether in a few years. Nestlé insists that it has no plans to sever all ties to Alcon, though analysts still expect the food giant to untether the eye-care group eventually. As for Deutsche Telekom, it won't be Europe's first long-distance operator to unload a wireless unit. British Telecom last year spun off mm02, and France Telcom floated a piece of its Orange mobile unit...
...down-home attitude is one reason Alias is succeeding where so many of its girl-guns-and-gams forebears have tanked. For, at first blush, the Sunday-night show is just a better-produced La Femme Nikita, the USA movie spin-off starring Peta Wilson that developed a cult following but little else...
That '80s Show (Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.) is less a spin-off than a brand extension. Its characters never appeared on '70s, but it promises the same kind of pop-reference-intensive humor, this time with Miami Vice jackets, wine coolers and Rubik's Cubes. "The timing just fell together," says co-creator Linda Wallem. "All the radio stations were doing '80s at Noon. MTV had just celebrated its big [20th] anniversary." She and her '70s colleagues Mark Brazill and Terry Turner decided to build '80s around struggling musician and record-store clerk Corey (Glenn Howerton), just out of college...