Asset stripping

Asset stripping is a practice in which a company or an individual, known as a corporate raider, takes control of another company and then auctions-off the acquired company's assets. Funds from the sold assets are often used to repay the debt of the corporate raider, which may have increased due to the acquisition. Corporate raiders use asset stripping to repay debts while increasing their net worth. A company that may become susceptible to asset stripping is any company whose individual assets are worth more than its collective net worth.

The term is generally used in a pejorative sense as such activity is not considered productive to the economy. Asset stripping is considered to be a problem in economies such as Russia or China that are making a transition to the market. In these situations, managers of a state-owned company have been known to sell the assets they control, leaving behind nothing but debts to the state.

The innovators of asset stripping were Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, and Nelson Peltz; all of whom were investors in the 1970s and 1980s. Carl Icahn performed one of the most notorious and hostile takeovers when he acquired Trans World Airlines in 1985. Here Icahn stripped TWA of its assets, selling them individually to repay the debt assimilated during the takeover. This particular corporate raid formed the idea of selling a company's assets in order to repay debt, and eventually increase the raider's net worth.

One of the biggest corporate raids that failed to materialize was the takeover of Gulf Oil by T. Boone Pickens. In 1984, Pickens attempted to acquire Gulf Oil and sell its assets individually to gain net worth. However, the purchase would have had been severely detrimental to Chevron; a customer of Gulf Oil. Therefore, Chevron stepped-in and merged with Gulf Oil for $13.2 billion, which at that time was the biggest merger between two companies.

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