DuPont de Nemours, the American multinational chemical company which traces its history back to 1802, announced plans to split into three publicly traded companies.
I wonder if this is the harbinger of a bunch of companies breaking up after decades of consolidation.
It would definitely be good to have a big round of breakups to get competition going again. Then we just have to fight against the consolidation that will start up in 20-30 years.
I wonder if this is the harbinger of a bunch of companies breaking up after decades of consolidation.
It isn’t consolidation, per se.
A lot of these older industrial companies had R&D tied to their businesses that would come up with random new product lines that could go from consumer goods to heavy industrial purposes. At that time, these companies would create new divisions to sell the new products.
Over time, the different product lines became more specialized and R&D for one division wasn’t helping other divisions like it used to. At that point, you would have a holding company effectively manage several wildly different companies that just happened to share some base technology.
At that point, it made more sense to break up these companies since the synergy for keeping these companies under one corporate board was lost and the management issues became too high.
I wonder if this is the harbinger of a bunch of companies breaking up after decades of consolidation.
It would definitely be good to have a big round of breakups to get competition going again. Then we just have to fight against the consolidation that will start up in 20-30 years.
It isn’t consolidation, per se.
A lot of these older industrial companies had R&D tied to their businesses that would come up with random new product lines that could go from consumer goods to heavy industrial purposes. At that time, these companies would create new divisions to sell the new products.
Over time, the different product lines became more specialized and R&D for one division wasn’t helping other divisions like it used to. At that point, you would have a holding company effectively manage several wildly different companies that just happened to share some base technology.
At that point, it made more sense to break up these companies since the synergy for keeping these companies under one corporate board was lost and the management issues became too high.