Agilent Technologies has completed the spinoff of its electronics measurement business; shares of the new company, Keysight Technologies, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: KEYS) yesterday. Keysight, with $2.9 billion in annual sales, is headquartered in Santa Rosa CA, across the bay from the rented Palo Alto garage where William Hewlett and David Packard started the Hewlett Packard Company in 1939. It designs and manufactures electronic measurement devices for the aerospace, communications, and semiconductor industries; an overview of its product line is here.
The slimmed-down Agilent, which itself was created as a spinoff from Hewlett Packard in 1999, will focus on its life sciences measurement business, including the parts it acquired with Varian (originally a spinoff from Varian Associates, another historic Silicon Valley company) in 2010.
Agilent can perhaps be credited for starting the current trend of large Silicon Valley companies splitting into two. Since the Agilent breakup was announced in September 2013:
- eBay announced plans to spin off PayPal, partly in response to pressure from corporate raider Carl Icahn (Sept 2014)
- JDS Uniphase announced plans to separate its optical components and commerical lasers business from its networking operations business. (Sept 2014)
- HP announced plans to split into two companies, focusing on the enterprise (HP Enterprise) and PC/consumer electronics, respectively (Oct 2014)
- Symantec reportedly plans to break up into two pieces, one focusing on security software and the other on data storage. (Oct 2014)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 05 2014, @02:12PM
It's all about PE ratio, our moron version of capitalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 06 2014, @04:21AM
Apparently it's because Wall Street analysts can't wrap their heads around a company that does more than one thing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday November 05 2014, @04:59PM
All that big companies do is merge and break up. Each time, a group of select people get a windfall amount of money. The churn is an endless cycle. In the late 90s/early 00s, it was mergers. Recently it's been spinoffs. In a few years it will be mergers again.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 05 2014, @05:51PM
That would explain why, about a month and a half ago, when I ordered four power supplies from Agilent, the invoice came from Keysight. At the time I figured Keysight must be a distributor or something.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 05 2014, @06:58PM
In other news the following companies will be splitting into two parts:-
More seriously, the Motorola split was omitted.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 05 2014, @11:26PM
Google will spin off "Don't Be, Inc" which will administer "Summer of Code", and a separate company which will keep the Google name.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 06 2014, @12:47AM
Maybe Google could split into Don't Be, Inc. and Evil, Inc.
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