Often, the parent company starts by selling a portion of the new company to the public, to establish a market and a following among investors. That way, by the time of the spin-off, stock in the new company may be liquid enough to be sold relatively easily, or retained with some confidence as a worthwhile investment.
In our experience, and in most academic studies of the subject, this helps the parent and its corporate spinoff. Both generally do better than comparable companies for at least several years after the spinoff takes place.
When a company carries out a spinoff, it sets up one of its subsidiaries or divisions as a separate company, then hands out shares in the new company to its own shareholders. It may hand out the shares as a special dividend, or give its shareholders an opportunity to swap shares of the parent company for the shares of the newly established spinoff.
Study after study has shown that after an initial adjustment period of a few months, stock spinoffs tend to outperform groups of comparable stocks for several years. (For that matter, the parent companies also tend to outperform comparable firms for several years after a spinoff.) The above-average performance of spinoffs makes sense for a couple of reasons.
First, company managers naturally prefer to acquire or expand their assets, not get rid of them. Getting rid of assets reduces a company’s total potential profit. The management of a parent company will only hand out a subsidiary to its own investors if it’s nearly certain that the subsidiary, and the parent, will be better off after the spinoff than before.
Second, spinoffs involve a lot of work and legal fees. Companies only have an incentive to do spinoffs under two sets of favourable conditions: When they feel it isn’t a good time to sell (which often means it’s a good time to buy); or, when they feel the assets they plan to spin off will be worth substantially more in the future, possibly within a few years.
Quite often, a big company will spin off a small subsidiary because it feels the subsidiary is a tiny gem, but that it’s too small to make an impact on the much larger financial statements and market capitalization of the parent.
At TSI Network we’ve had great success with a number of spun off stocks over the years. That’s especially true of the many spinoffs we have recommended that have gone up after they began trading, and have later attracted a takeover bid at a substantial premium over the market price.
Needless to say, things don’t always work out this well. Spinoffs and their parents do sometimes run into unforeseeable woes. But on the whole, in investing, spinoffs are the closest thing you can find to a sure thing.
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By cutting manufacturing plants and eliminating overlapping functions, the merger aimed to improve profitability. However, the plan failed to deliver the expected benefits, partly because consumers are eating less processed foods.
The company now aims to boost its value by breaking itself into two separate firms—one will focus on sauces and spreads, while the other will make meats, cheese, coffee and desserts for North America.
Since then, IBM has soared 110%, thanks to investor enthusiasm for its advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing. However, due to the low-profit margin contracts it inherited from IBM, Kyndryl is down 20%.
We still like Kyndryl’s outlook, but it will probably make little progress until it sheds those legacy contracts. Meantime, IBM remains a great buy for long-term gains.
We think that spinoffs are the closest thing you can find to a sure thing for two main reasons:
On July 31, 2025, Figma completed an initial public offering of 36.94 million class A common shares at $33.00 each. Insiders continue to control the company through multiple voting shares.
In September 2022, Rumble became a publicly traded company after merging with a special-purpose acquisition company.
The stock jumped 20% recently after Rumble offered to merge with Northern Data AG, a German AI cloud infrastructure firm.
The split has worked out well for both firms—Yum is up over 130%, while Yum China has gained nearly 80%.
We still like the outlook for both, particularly as their digital ordering platforms are speeding up service and encouraging higher customer spending per visit. Their rising earnings also give them more cash for dividends and share buybacks.
In June 2015, Gannett Co. Inc. (New York symbol GCI) spun off its newspaper operation as a separate company operating under the Gannett name. The remaining broadcasting and Internet unit was then renamed Tegna. Under the deal, for every two shares investors held, they received one share of the spinoff company and two shares in Tegna.
Earlier this year, under pressure from activist investors, GFL sold 56% of its Environmental Solutions division for $5.93 billion. That business collects and treats hazardous liquids and offers soil re-mediation services.