Would Disney spin off Disneyland? Corporate breakup talk ‘jumps the shark’, The Edge argues Walt Disney Spinoff
Oct 30, 2014
By Michael Santoli, Senior Writer at Yahoo! Finance. When a craze washes across Wall Street, it does so in phases. Take the current trend of big corporate breakups. The easy and obvious deals get done first, such as media companies shedding publishing operations or Pfizer Inc. (PFE) spinning off its animal-drug unit. Then pushy investors start prodding companies to split apart to create a likely stock pop (see eBay Inc. [EBAY] and Dupont Co. [DD]), and unwieldy corporate giants – hello, Hewlett-Packard Corp. (HPQ) – concede an empire’s demise by cracking in two.
Jim Osman is publisher of the Spinoff Report and founder of The Edge Consulting Group, a research firm focused on “special situation” stock ideas involving identifiable catalysts. In addition to tracking new spinoffs and searching for other value-liberating prospects, the firm handicaps possible breakup candidates and has had some luck predicting splits by Symantec Corp. (SYMC), Bayer AG (BAYRY) and others. Now, Osman is suggesting that Disney should consider separating its…