Manitowoc Company (MTW, Financial) has announed that it will seperate its businesses after having activist investors like Carl Icahn (Trades, Portfolio) of Icahn Enterprices (IEP, Financial) push for its. Yesterday the company announced that it will seperate their construction and food equipment businesses into seperate into to indepentant, publicly traded companies. The plans to to finalized the tax-free spin-offs in earlier in 2016.
The Chairman and CEO Glen Tellock said in a statement on the plan tax- free spin-offs, " The timing is right now so each of them can pursue individual strategies and they can attract capital in different environments,” He went on to say in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, " We see it as an opportune time to make this split in 2016,”
The company had a rough year for both businesses and projecting a weak forcast for 2015. This is especially true for the firms crane division. Manitowoc guidance for crane revenues would drop by 5% in 2015, this is after sales in 2014 were off 8% from 2013 to $2.3 billion. Operating income from the crane division was down 25% to $163.9 million.
The firms food equipment business weakened in the last quarter of 2014. Sales was still up 2.6% from 2013 to $1.6 billion and operating income was down 6.5% to $234 million Mantowoc expects the food equipment business sales to increase in 2015 by about 5%.
