Corporate Spring Cleaning: 2025's Spinoff Spree Sets Up 2026's Shopping Bonanza

2025 was basically the year of corporate spring cleaning, with around 50 US companies deciding to spin off parts of their business - and we're talking about the biggest wave of these moves we've seen in over ten years. It's like companies looked around and said, "okay, time to get rid of the stuff that's dragging us down" - particularly those slower-growing, money-hungry divisions in healthcare, media, and agriculture that were eating up resources without delivering the goods.

What's really interesting is who was leading the charge. This time around it was healthcare and media companies stealing the show. Healthcare firms were being pretty smart about it - they separated their old-school, legacy operations from the exciting, high-growth stuff to make everything more attractive to potential buyers. Take Vivani, for example: they spun off Cortigent so they could focus all their energy on obesity treatments (which is huge right now) while Cortigent could do their own thing with visual prosthetics. Then you had Becton Dickinson getting rid of their biosciences and diagnostics unit because, frankly, it was growing too slowly and needed way too much cash compared to their main medical device business.

The media companies had a totally different vibe; they seemed to be in survival mode, trying to deal with shrinking cash flows and everyone cutting the cord on traditional TV. IAC's move to spin off Angi is a perfect example. Angi wasn't exactly setting the world on fire growth-wise and needed tons of investment, but it had a solid brand and a big market to play in, so it made sense to let it fly solo. Over in agriculture, Corteva did something clever by splitting their crop-protection chemicals from their seeds business, essentially creating two companies that could each focus on what they do best without getting tangled up in each other's different needs.

Now here's where it gets really exciting! All this corporate housekeeping in 2025 is basically setting up what could be a massive shopping spree in 2026. Everything's lining up perfectly: interest rates are dropping (making it cheaper to borrow money for deals), regulators seem way more chill about letting companies merge than they've been in years and the 2025 GOP tax changes are making it even more attractive to use debt and invest in acquisitions. This isn't just wishful thinking either - we've seen this movie before. HP spun off Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2015 and then turned around and bought Samsung's printer business the next year. IBM did the same thing, spinning off Kyndryl in 2021 and then scooping up Apptio in 2023.

The whole strategy makes total sense when you think about it. Companies spent 2025 decluttering their operations and now they've got these clean, focused businesses that are perfect for making strategic acquisitions. Buyers love this stuff - they want companies with clear financials and straightforward operations, not messy conglomerates where it's hard to figure out what's what. So as we head into 2026, it looks like companies are shifting gears from "let's clean house" mode to "let's go shopping" mode. With streamlined operations, cheap money, friendly regulators and tax breaks, 2026 could be absolutely wild for deal-making and companies growing through smart acquisitions rather than just trying to fix their internal problems.

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