Corporate Spin-offs: Breaking up Is Hard to Do
企业分拆：分拆不易
At least profitably
至少很难通过分拆获利
Corporate fashions come and go, and this season’s is industrial break-ups. In America and Europe, once-sprawling conglomerates are being carved up into focused companies that investors hope will fare better on their own. Those banking on quick returns have mostly been disappointed.
企业界的潮流变来变去，这一季的趋势是工业企业分拆。在美国和欧洲，曾经庞大而无序拓展的企业集团正被分拆成业务更聚焦的公司。投资者希望拆分后的公司凭借它们自身会经营得更好。然而那些指望得到快速回报的人大多失望了。
Conglomerates thrived in the 1970s, and made a comeback after the merger frenzy of the late 1990s. They are beloved of megalomaniac bosses keen to prove they can run empires peddling anything from train carriages to CT scanners (as Siemens currently does, albeit not, as it announced last month, for much longer). But the argument that diversity lets a firm’s healthy arms prop up temporarily frail ones is, once again, losing ground in the rich world.
企业集团在上世纪70年代蓬勃发展，到90年代后期合并狂潮掀起后又再次兴盛。自大狂老板们钟爱它们，他们极力想证明自己能运营销售从火车车厢到CT扫描仪等种种产品的企业帝国（西门子目前就是如此，不过上月它宣布不久将做出调整）。但是，认为多元化能让一家公司有活力的部门暂时支撑疲弱的部门的论调再一次在富裕世界中失势。
Private-equity funds have pots of money to buy unwanted divisions. Listing companies – or spinning them off to existing investors – is easier than it once was. Plenty of activist hedge funds are pressing firms to restructure, hoping to cash in when the sum of conglomerates’ parts fetches more than the whole (studies show this can be true in the long run).
私募股权基金拥有大量资金，可以买下企业不想再要的部门。让公司上市——或将其分拆给现有投资者——要比以前更容易。许多维权对冲基金都在向企业施压，要求它们开展重组，希望分拆后各业务部门的利润总和会超过原来的企业集团，以此获得回报（研究表明从长远来看这种情况是可能的）。
Gauging the impact of a break-up announcement is hard. Investors price in its likelihood before a company owns up to “exploring strategic options”. Splits often follow bad results that enfeeble the management, which may in turn mean worse news down the line.
要衡量分拆消息公布后的影响很难。在公司承认将“探索战略选择”之前，投资者就已经消化了这种可能性。做出分拆的决定往往是在出现让管理层失势的糟糕业绩之后，而这可能意味着还会有更糟的新闻爆出。
Recent break-ups, only Honeywell, which filed listing documents for its car-parts and home-security arms last August, has subsequently outperformed the broader market. United Technologies has kept pace with it. General Electric, Thyssenkrupp, DowDuPont and ABB have not. If their share prices fall any more, they will be ripe for a takeover.
近期分拆的企业中，只有霍尼韦尔在分拆后跑赢了大盘。这家公司在去年8月为其汽车零部件和家居安防部门提交了上市文件。联合技术与大盘持平。通用电气、蒂森克虏伯、陶氏杜邦和ABB都弱于大盘。如果它们的股价继续下跌，就可以出手收购了。
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