Does Corporate Diversification Destroy Value?

Abstract

We analyze several hundred firms that expand via acquisition and0or increase their number of business segments. The combined market reaction to acquisition announcements is positive but acquiring firm excess values decline after the diversifying event. Much of the excess value reduction occurs because our sample firms acquire already discounted business units, and not because diversifying destroys value. This implies that the standard assumption that conglomerate divisions can be benchmarked to typical stand-alone f irms should be carefully reconsidered. We also show that excess value does not decline when firms increase their number of business segments because of pure reporting changes. DOES CORPORATE DIVERSIF ICATION destroy value? Several recent papers attempt to answer this question by comparing the market value of firms that operate multiple lines of business to the value of a portfolio of stand-alone firms operating in the same industries as the conglomerate’s divisions. Lang and Stulz ~1994! use this approach and find that multisegment firms have low values of Tobin’s q compared to stand-alone firms. Similarly, Berger and Ofek ~1995! find that U.S. conglomerates are priced at a mean discount of about 15 percent. Lins and Servaes ~1999! find similar discounts in Japan and the United Kingdom. Indeed, based on the Berger and Ofek methodology, diversified firms with valuation discounts had aggregate value losses of $800 billion in 1995. The magnitude of the value loss suggests that operating the divisions of conglomerates as stand-alone firms would create significant value. In this paper, we provide new evidence on whether the act of corporate diversification destroys value, or whether the divisions that make up conglomerates would trade at a discount, even if they operated as standalone firms.