Delineating Diversification From Deworsification

January 2018 Newsletter | Corporate diversification is a strategy involving entering a new market, industry, geography or product category that the business does not operate in. Deworsification might be defined as the process of a business acquiring an asset that is inferior in quality to the company’s existing group of assets. It may also involve selling the company’s best asset to reinvest in inferior assets again leaving shareholders with exposure to lower quality assets than if management had done nothing. Unfortunately financial history is littered with countless value-destroying examples of deworsification. In this edition we discuss the risks when corporate diversification become deworsification.