Symantec Corp on Thursday became the latest technology company to announce plans to split in two.
The company, which has a market value of more than US$16 billion, is scheduled to become two publicly traded companies — one focused on security and the other on information management.
The announcement comes after one by Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) on Monday that it planned to spin off its personal computer and printer business into a new company called HP Inc.
What remains will be known as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and is set to focus on business clients.
Only a week before HP’s announcement, eBay Inc said it would turn its PayPal unit into a new publicly traded company, bowing to the wishes of activist billionaire investor Carl Icahn.
“We really are in two businesses, and there are a lot of disruptive trends in each,” Michael Brown, chief executive of Symantec, which is based in Mountain View, California, said in an interview.
Unlike HP, which has been burdened by the slow growing market for printers and PCs, Symantec said both of its businesses were still growing fast.
“We don’t have a business that’s old and one that’s new,” Brown said. “These are both industry leaders in growing markets.”
The security business, which is what Symantec is best known for, provides products and services to governments, companies and individuals, and is the market leader.
Revenue from the security business was about US$4.2 billion in the last fiscal year.
The information management business creates backup software, and had revenue of about US$2.5 billion last year.
The split will be tax free to shareholders, reducing the likelihood of a taxable competing bid from a bigger rival for either unit.
No activist investor appeared to be pressing Symantec for a split.
ValueAct, a hedge fund, had taken a stake this year but has sold its shares.
Brown said no activist was pressuring management behind the scenes, either.
More splits may follow.
EMC Corp, a big data storage company, is under pressure from the activist hedge fund Elliott Management to break apart, notably with a full spinoff of VMWare, a virtualization company of which it owns 20 percent.
Elliott on Wednesday outlined thoughts for a separation and EMC said it was in talks with the hedge fund, but did not rebut any of the ideas it had put forward.
To many, Tatu City on the outskirts of Nairobi looks like a success. The first city entirely built by a private company to be operational in east Africa, with about 25,000 people living and working there, it accounts for about two-thirds of all foreign investment in Kenya. Its low-tax status has attracted more than 100 businesses including Heineken, coffee brand Dormans, and the biggest call-center and cold-chain transport firms in the region. However, to some local politicians, Tatu City has looked more like a target for extortion. A parade of governors have demanded land worth millions of dollars in exchange
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) revenue jumped 48 percent last month, underscoring how electronics firms scrambled to acquire essential components before global tariffs took effect. The main chipmaker for Apple Inc and Nvidia Corp reported monthly sales of NT$349.6 billion (US$11.6 billion). That compares with the average analysts’ estimate for a 38 percent rise in second-quarter revenue. US President Donald Trump’s trade war is prompting economists to retool GDP forecasts worldwide, casting doubt over the outlook for everything from iPhone demand to computing and datacenter construction. However, TSMC — a barometer for global tech spending given its central role in the
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
RSS