From AT&T to GE: history's biggest corporate spinoffs

A corporate spinoff carves a division out of its parent and floats it as an independent, publicly traded company. Shares in the new business usually go to the parent's existing shareholders. No fresh capital is raised, and no outside buyer writes a check. That makes a spinoff different from a sale or a traditional IPO. The parent shrinks, the offspring stands on its own, and investors wake up holding stock in two companies instead of one.

Executives almost always pitch the move the same way. Value is trapped inside a sprawling conglomerate, and separating the pieces lets managers and shareholders concentrate on one business rather than several unrelated ones bundled under a single ticker. Pressure often comes from outside — activist investors pushing for a breakup, or, in AT&T $T's case, antitrust regulators forcing one.

The record of corporate spinoffs is uneven. AbbVie, separated from Abbott $ABT Laboratories in 2013, grew into one of the world's largest drug companies. Kraft Foods Group, the grocery half of a 2012 split, struggled on its own and was folded into Kraft Heinz $KHC within three years. Some breakups hand investors a focused, fast-growing company that had been subsidizing a slower sibling. Others expose a weak business that had been leaning on a stronger one for cover.

A breakup is never purely financial engineering. It forces a company to answer which of its units genuinely belong together. It also forces an answer on which ones were propping each other up, and which were dragging down the valuation of the whole.

This list covers 10 of the biggest corporate spinoffs of the past five decades, selected for their size, their historical weight, or the mark they left on an industry. Each entry explains the business logic behind the split and what happened afterward — to shareholders, to employees, and to the company left standing. Together they amount to a practical guide to when corporate breakups work and when they fail to deliver what was promised.

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The 1984 breakup of AT&T $T is the largest corporate separation in U.S. history. A federal antitrust consent decree stripped the Bell System of its local telephone operations and reorganized them into seven independent regional carriers known as the Baby Bells.

Those seven were Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell and US West. Each inherited the local wires, switches and customer relationships in its own part of the country.

AT&T kept the assets its leadership read as the future: the long-distance network, the Western Electric manufacturing arm and Bell Labs. What it gave up was a regulated local monopoly that collected predictable cash from nearly every household and business phone line in the country. The government's goal was to open long distance and equipment manufacturing to competitors while keeping local service regulated as a utility.

The economics then moved against the half AT&T chose. Long-distance calling became a commodity as MCI and Sprint undercut prices and as new switching and fiber technology drove down the cost of carrying a call. The local lines AT&T surrendered turned into the physical base for broadband and, later, wireless backhaul.

The Baby Bells spent the following two decades reassembling much of what the court had taken apart. Bell Atlantic absorbed NYNEX, then merged with GTE to form Verizon $VZ. Southwestern Bell renamed itself SBC Communications and bought Pacific Telesis and Ameritech. In 2005 SBC acquired its own former parent and adopted the AT&T name and logo. The combined company added BellSouth the next year. Qwest absorbed US West.

For employees, divestiture ended the lifetime-employment culture of the old Bell System. Repeated restructurings at AT&T and at the regional carriers cut deep into what had been one of the largest workforces in American industry.

Long-distance rates did fall after the breakup. Cable, mobile service and internet calling ultimately did more to reshape what Americans pay for communication than the consent decree itself.

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eBay completed the separation of PayPal $PYPL in July 2015, turning the payments unit it had bought for roughly $1.5 billion in 2002 into an independent public company. PayPal's market value soon surpassed that of the marketplace that had owned it for 13 years.

Activist investor Carl Icahn campaigned publicly for the breakup in early 2014, arguing that PayPal's growth was obscured inside eBay's slower auction and retail operation. Icahn, an eBay shareholder at the time, also nominated his own candidates to the board. eBay's directors resisted the idea at first, then reversed course and announced the separation that September.

The commercial logic rested on where PayPal's business was coming from. A rising share of its payment volume ran through merchants with no connection to eBay listings, and sitting inside a marketplace made it awkward to sign up eBay's direct rivals. Independence removed that conflict and let the company pursue deals across the retail industry.

PayPal carried Venmo into the split. It had acquired the peer-to-peer app in 2013 as part of its purchase of payments processor Braintree. Venmo became one of the most widely used money-transfer services in the U.S. and gave PayPal a consumer relationship with no link to checkout buttons on shopping sites.

eBay found the years after separation harder. Its marketplace lost ground to Amazon $AMZN and to newer resale platforms, and growth stayed modest. The company kept shrinking: it sold StubHub to viagogo in 2020, sold its classified ads business to Adevinta, and moved its own checkout away from PayPal to a managed payments system built with the Dutch processor Adyen.

The split works as an example of a narrow condition rather than a general rule. PayPal already had its own merchants, its own competitors and its own route to expansion, so cutting it loose exposed value the combined share price had not reflected. Divisions that depend on the parent for customers, distribution or shared costs rarely produce the same outcome.

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Kraft Foods broke itself in two in October 2012, separating a mature North American grocery business from a faster-growing global snacks operation. Kraft Foods Group kept Oscar Mayer, Philadelphia cream cheese, Jell-O and the boxed macaroni and cheese line. Mondelez $MDLZ International took Oreo, Cadbury, Trident gum and the rest of the international snacking portfolio.

The split answered a mismatch that had become difficult to manage under a single strategy. The grocery brands generated dependable cash in a saturated U.S. market with little volume growth. The snacks brands were expanding in India, Brazil and China, where rising incomes were creating new packaged-food buyers. One half needed cost discipline and steady dividends. The other needed capital for distribution and marketing in markets it was still entering.

Irene Rosenfeld, who had run Kraft through its contested 2010 takeover of the British confectioner Cadbury, took the snacks company and became chief executive of Mondelez. The two businesses diverged from there.

Kraft Foods Group did not last long on its own. North American demand for processed grocery staples kept softening, and in 2015 the company was acquired by H.J. Heinz, backed by the Brazilian private equity firm 3G Capital, to create Kraft Heinz $KHC. The combination ran on aggressive cost cutting. Kraft Heinz later wrote down billions of dollars in the carrying value of the Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands, conceding that the labels were worth less than the balance sheet claimed.

Mondelez fared better. Snacks cross borders more easily than refrigerated grocery products, and Oreo sells widely outside the U.S. The company still absorbs margin pressure from cocoa and wheat costs and from shifting consumer attitudes toward sugar.

The separation did not cause the decline in the grocery half; it exposed one. Freed of the snacks business, Kraft Foods Group had no growth story of its own, and a buyout offer arrived less than three years after the companies parted. Mondelez, meanwhile, got the capital flexibility to chase markets the old conglomerate had funded only partially.

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Abbott $ABT Laboratories split off its research-based pharmaceutical business as a standalone company, AbbVie, on Jan. 1, 2013. AbbVie took Humira, the anti-inflammatory drug that became the world's top-selling prescription medicine. Humira treats rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease and plaque psoriasis, among other conditions. Abbott kept medical devices, diagnostics, nutrition and the branded generic drugs it sold outside the U.S. Abbott shareholders received one AbbVie share for every Abbott share they held.

The structure handed two sets of investors two different risk profiles. Abbott's retained units produce steady revenue across hospital equipment, infant formula and laboratory testing, and earnings there do not hinge on a single product. AbbVie inherited the opposite proposition: concentrated exposure to a branded drug portfolio, with the patent cliff attached to it. When a blockbuster loses exclusivity, biosimilar rivals arrive and sales can drop sharply within a few quarters.

AbbVie spent its first decade preparing for that moment. Humira's U.S. exclusivity ended in 2023, and biosimilar versions reached the American market that year. By then, AbbVie had developed Skyrizi and Rinvoq, two newer immunology drugs that cover much of the same treatment territory. It had also bought Allergan in 2020 in a deal valued at roughly $63 billion, adding Botox and a large aesthetics franchise to the pipeline.

Abbott grew along a quieter path. Its continuous glucose monitoring line, FreeStyle Libre, became one of the most widely used diabetes devices in the world. Its diagnostics arm expanded during the Covid-19 pandemic on demand for rapid antigen tests, including BinaxNOW. Neither business fits the valuation logic applied to a company judged on drug patents and clinical trial results.

The two companies have run on separate clocks ever since. AbbVie directs capital toward pipeline deals and acquisitions, and its shareholders accept patent risk in exchange for drug margins. Abbott invests in devices and testing platforms with longer, slower product cycles and fewer sudden revenue drops. Neither half faded after the separation, and AbbVie did not collapse when its flagship product lost patent protection.

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Hewlett-Packard divided itself in two on Nov. 1, 2015, creating HP $HPQ Inc. for personal computers and printers and Hewlett Packard Enterprise for servers, storage, networking and corporate technology services. It was one of the largest breakups the technology industry had seen, cutting a company founded in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 into two comparable halves.

The separation followed years of turmoil. HP agreed in 2011 to buy the British software company Autonomy for about $11 billion. A year later it wrote down $8.8 billion tied to that deal and accused Autonomy's former management of accounting improprieties. The dispute generated litigation in the U.K. and U.S. for more than a decade. Leadership churned alongside it: Mark Hurd resigned in 2010, Léo Apotheker lasted less than a year, and Meg Whitman took the job in 2011.

Whitman framed the split as a structural fix rather than a financial one. Selling laptops and ink to consumers and retailers is a high-volume, low-margin business tied to product cycles and shelf space. Selling data center hardware to corporate IT departments runs on long procurement cycles, negotiated contracts and service relationships. The two sides shared a brand and not much else.

HP Inc. kept the more mature market. PC demand swings with corporate refresh cycles and with competition from Dell $DELL and Lenovo. Printing supplies — the ink and toner customers keep buying long after the hardware — remained the steadier profit source. HP Inc. added Samsung's printer unit in a deal that closed in 2017.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise narrowed its focus and bought growth. It separated its software business, which merged with Micro Focus, and its enterprise services arm, which combined with CSC to form DXC Technology, both in 2017. It pushed into high-performance computing by acquiring the supercomputer maker Cray in 2019. Networking came next. HPE closed a roughly $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks $JNPR in 2025, after the U.S. Department of Justice challenged the deal on antitrust grounds.

Neither company turned into a high-growth technology stock. Each gained the ability to spend and acquire on its own terms, without the other half's economics shaping the decision.

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General Electric $GE finished dismantling itself between 2023 and 2024, breaking the former conglomerate into GE HealthCare, GE Vernova, and GE Aerospace. Chief executive Larry Culp announced the plan in 2021, ending a structure that had bundled jet engines, power turbines, medical scanners, appliances, broadcasting, and finance under one corporate roof for most of the 20th century.

GE HealthCare went first, listing as an independent company in January 2023 with the medical imaging, ultrasound, and diagnostics equipment business. GE Vernova followed in April 2024 with power generation, wind and renewable energy, and electrification. What remained — jet engines and aviation services — took the name GE Aerospace, so the parent company became the division that had long been its most profitable and most predictable earner.

Years of decline preceded the breakup. GE Capital, the finance arm that once supplied a large share of company profits, left behind debt and insurance liabilities that took years to unwind after the 2008 financial crisis. The 2015 purchase of the power business of French manufacturer Alstom landed just as global demand for large gas and coal turbines weakened, and GE later wrote down much of that investment. GE's market value sat far below its early-2000s peak by the time the three-way separation was announced.

Results since have varied by unit. GE Aerospace has been the strongest of the three, carried by recovering commercial air travel and by long-term service contracts that generate revenue for decades after an engine is sold. GE HealthCare has grown more slowly in a crowded imaging market. GE Vernova has booked rising orders for gas turbines and grid equipment as electricity demand climbs, including from data centers, while its offshore wind business has recorded losses on problem contracts.

The consequences reach past GE's own balance sheet. The company spent decades as the model for the American industrial conglomerate, and its exit from that structure marked how little value public markets now assign to businesses that span unrelated industries.

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The 2017 merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont was designed to be temporary from the day it was announced. Both companies agreed in advance that the combined entity, DowDuPont, would be divided into three independent public businesses once the deal closed. That three-way separation finished in 2019, making it one of the rare megamergers with its own dissolution written into the original plan.

The assets were sorted by the kind of chemistry each one sold. Dow took commodity chemicals and plastics, the high-volume end of the industry tied to oil and gas feedstock costs. DuPont kept specialty products, including electronics materials and protective fibers such as Kevlar and Tyvek. Corteva was assembled from DuPont's seed and crop protection operations plus Dow's agricultural chemicals unit, creating a standalone agriculture company built around the Pioneer seed brand.

The logic had as much to do with valuation as with operations. Commodity chemicals, specialty materials and agriculture serve different customers, follow different cycles and trade at different multiples. A single company whose earnings swing with ethylene margins, semiconductor demand and farmers' planting decisions is hard for investors to price. Separating the three let each be measured against its own competitors instead of a blended average.

Performance since 2019 has tracked each company's end markets. DuPont's specialty portfolio leans on electronics and semiconductor materials, and the company kept reshaping itself after the split, combining its nutrition and biosciences unit with International Flavors & Fragrances in 2021. Dow carries the cyclical exposure of commodity petrochemicals, where margins compress when feedstock costs climb or global capacity runs ahead of demand. Corteva's results move with crop prices, farm incomes and competition in seeds and crop protection.

What separates this breakup from most others is how planned it was. It did not follow activist pressure, a scandal or a collapsing share price. The merger functioned as a sorting mechanism — pool the overlapping assets, capture the cost savings, then redistribute the parts into three companies with cleaner business models than either Dow or DuPont had carried on its own.

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ConocoPhillips $COP separated its refining, marketing, chemicals and midstream operations into an independent company called Phillips 66 $PSX in April 2012, keeping oil and gas exploration and production under the ConocoPhillips name. One integrated oil major became two businesses with opposite exposures to the price of crude.

The logic came down to how each half earns money. Exploration and production profits track the price of oil. Refining profits depend on the crack spread — the gap between what a refiner pays for crude and what it earns selling gasoline, diesel and jet fuel — which often widens when crude is cheap. Holding both inside one company meant the two partly cancelled each other out, and investors had trouble valuing either on its own merits.

Ryan Lance took over ConocoPhillips, by then the largest U.S. independent oil and gas producer by output. Greg Garland led Phillips 66, which inherited refineries, pipelines, the Phillips 66, Conoco and 76 fuel brands, and a 50% stake in Chevron $CVX Phillips Chemical Company, the petrochemicals venture it shares with Chevron.

Timing favored the refiner. Cheap North American crude lifted refining margins in the years after the separation, and Phillips 66 pushed further into midstream, buying in the rest of DCP Midstream in 2023. ConocoPhillips had no refining cushion left when crude collapsed between 2014 and 2016. It cut its dividend sharply in early 2016, then rebuilt scale by acquiring Concho Resources in 2021 and Marathon $MPC Oil in 2024.

Marathon Oil had set the precedent a year earlier by spinning off Marathon Petroleum in 2011. ConocoPhillips was the bigger company to make the same move, and together the two breakups set the shape of the modern American energy sector. Pure-play drillers sit on one side, independent refiners and fuel marketers on the other. The pressure to divide did not end there. Elliott Investment Management built a stake in Phillips 66 in 2025 and argued the company should separate its midstream arm as well.

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Rupert Murdoch split his media empire into two public companies in June 2013, putting the newspapers in one and the screens in the other. News Corp took the publishing assets, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, HarperCollins and a portfolio of Australian and British titles. 21st Century Fox took the Fox broadcast network, Fox News and the 20th Century Fox film and television studios. The Murdoch family kept control of both through dual-class share structures.

The breakup followed the phone hacking scandal that engulfed News of the World, Murdoch's British tabloid, in 2011. The paper was closed amid the fallout, and the company faced police investigations, civil claims and questioning by members of Parliament. Investors had already argued that the newspapers were dragging down the valuation of the entertainment business, which grew faster and earned higher margins. The scandal made that argument urgent.

21st Century Fox was the half that changed hands. It sold most of its film and television studio assets to Disney $DIS in 2019 in a deal valued at more than $70 billion. Disney got the 20th Century Fox library, the FX networks and Fox's stake in Hulu, which handed it majority control of the streaming service. What Murdoch kept was reorganized as Fox Corporation, a smaller company built around Fox News, Fox Sports and the broadcast network — assets whose value rests on live viewing rather than a back catalog.

News Corp has contended with the same structural decline hitting newspapers everywhere: falling print advertising, shrinking circulation and the loss of classified revenue to the web. Digital subscription growth at The Wall Street Journal has offset part of that. The company also owns Move Inc., which operates Realtor.com, giving it a property-listings business with no connection to journalism.

The 2013 separation changed little on its own. What it did was isolate the entertainment assets inside one corporate entity, so Disney could buy them six years later without taking on the newspapers.