Hillenbrand Should Spinoff Its Casket Business. It Would Mean 50% Upside For Shareholders.
Aug 15, 2022
As humans, we find death a difficult topic as it brings up a lot of feelings of anxiety, fear and awkwardness. As well as sadness. It’s extremely unsettling to think of our mortality. We tend to put it out of our minds, but as with taxes, death is an absolute certainty, as Mr. Benjamin Franklin so succinctly put it.
Here at The Edge, we to seek out untapped shareholder value as well as underperforming companies for Activist investors. Furthermore, when we find them, we also need to explain exactly how that can be achieved. Sometimes companies are sitting on hidden value and at other times, they just need to be given a push to consider looking more closely at finding and ultimately realizing that value for shareholders.
One company that came across our radar two years ago was Hillenbrand (HI), currently trading at $45 a share. This Indiana based company is listed on the NYSE and has a market capitalization of just over $3 billion. It has many businesses in the industrial sector that complement quite nicely together. The business it has that sticks out like a sore thumb and that doesn’t fit with the rest of the company is its “Batesville” business, which is involved in the manufacturing and sale of funeral service products, including burial and cremation caskets, cremation containers and urns, other personalization and memorialization products and technology applications for funeral homes.