See: Tax-Free Spinoff.
You run a novelty underwear company. You want to get rid of your glow-in-the-dark thong division. You're going to spin it off as its own company.
There are a couple of ways to structure the deal. Some result in capital gains taxes for the parent company. These fall into the "taxable spin-off" category. These happen when the company is sold to an outside party (say, a hedge fund comes in and buys the Bright Thong unit to set it up as its own company). Also, conducting an IPO for the new company could result in taxes for the parent company.
However, you do have choices that avoid the taxes. You can conduct the spin-off in a way that would be tax-free. For instance, you could issue shares of the new Bright Thong's stand-alone company to your shareholders. They would own both the parent company and the new company, in equal proportion.
The tax-free option obviously has the appeal of avoiding taxes. But it doesn't bring in any cash for the parent company. It just serves to separate the businesses. The taxable model can be useful if the goal of the transaction is to raise capital for the parent company.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What are dividends, and how do ...4 Views
Finance Allah shmoop what our dividends and how do they
affect stock prices Well guess what People they help That's
how they affect stock prices Well what are they What
are dividends Well they're usually paid in cash to shareholders
of record I legally if you own the stock than
you're entitled to the dividend that is if you were
In fact according to the brokerage where you held these
shares the owner of record as of say June fifteenth
then you too will receive a dividend of twelve cents
for each share you own payable on July twenty eighth
or something like that So dividends are declared at will
by the board of the company and are usually the
domain of well heeled already established large companies with so
much excess cash profits that the more or less don't
know what else to do with it A T and
T Coke Disney Apple They all pay huge dollar amounts
in aggregate total dividends Some have done so for a
hundred years or more like a T Others like Apple
just started Apple had just passed one hundred billion dollars
in cash on their balance sheet when finally shareholders said
Hey what about some of that cash for me So
they're at least two logical ways to think about dividends
offense and defense from an offensive perspective And you know
we love being offensive here It shmoop central dividends Add
to the compound ing of stock returns like Tongue Guards
Inc has grown in share price six percent a year
kind of meth performance flood It has had a three
percent dividend and it keeps raising that dividend each year
So combined that stock is delivering total return of nine
percent better than in ten years The six percent compound
ER would grow to one point Owe six to the
tenth power or about one point eight acts Not quite
double But if it compounded at one point o nine
to the tenth power well it is grown to two
point four acts like before two and a half times
as much money as you started with a decade earlier
right or in an initial thousand dollar investment What you'd
have twenty four hundred dollars minus the eighteen hundred dollars
or six hundred dollars Mohr with dividends in there and
gas were rounding dramatically and the dividends get raised each
year Bottom line Just dividends are good they add to
your total return We're ignoring taxes also here and we're
ignoring the possibility that you could directly reinvest those dividends
Taub I'm or shares of that stock which would then
have even Mohr Power incom pounding All right But that's
offense What about defense Like your young you want to
own stocks for thirty years but you're afraid of the
downside The dark side the century stocks right That's one
of stock goes down one hundred percent Yeah well stocks
that pay a dividend rarely if ever go fully bust
for them to have gotten to that happy place where
they pay a divvy They're probably a pretty well established
domain owner or at least one point had enough excess
cash to distribute back to its owners in the form
of a dividend But there's another even better defensive thing
that dividend paying stocks offer That is they are cushions
in a bad market And the number of feathers in
that cushion is metered or measured by what's called the
payout ratio which is the percentage of earnings that a
company is paying out in dividends That is if the
company is earning a dollar a share in his paying
out thirty cents a share in DV dollars while their
payout ratio is only thirty percent So their earnings could
drop a lot and they'd still easily be ableto pay
their thirty cent dividend But if they're ratio was more
like eighty percent like they earned a dollar and they're
paying eighty cents in dividend dough than Ooh that's tight
If earnings dropped well even a quarter the company would
be paying out Maurin dividend payments than they have earnings
And this has happened in spades with modern day oil
industry who had to borrow money to be able to
continue to pay its dividend and not cut it Why
such a stretch and all the effort to not cut
the divvy Well because Wall Street views a dividend is
a kind of commitment like a promise ring It means
you are fully off tinder and match and J date
So if you ever cut or do away with your
divvy the management is usually all fired with their careers
pretty much oriented toward the uber you know driving them
not running a company like Doria Well look at what
happened to G E in the modern era when they
cut their dividend Yeah Ouch But let's say the whole
market craps out you know bad economic cycle or whatever
and our company goes from earning a dollars shared only
seventy cents and the stock goes from twenty bucks a
share to ten Well then it's payout ratio in that
thirty cent dividend world is now thirty over seventy or
forty three percent payout ratio It's higher payout ratio than
it wass but still presumably really safe to continue going
Maybe they won't raise it again this year but it's
not going away And on twenty bucks a share A
thirty cents of Devi well then was only yielding one
point five percent Pretty small Davey But now at ten
bucks a share and thirty of Debbie Well it's yielding
thirty cents over ten dollars or three percent Well with
Treasury Bills yielding about the same amount they quote on
ly unquote bet you have to make and buying that
stock is if it won't cut The dividend comes up
You get more money and dividends that air pretty safe
Well you feel pretty good about buying stock if you're
gonna hold it along And if they don't cut the
Davy well you not only get a low price to
earnings multiple stock likely with a lot of price appreciation
in the future but you get a more tax efficient
cash piece coming back to you How our dividends Mohr
tax efficient Well bonds or tax as ordinary income think
forty or fifty percent for hire Taxpayers in blue states
while qualified equity dividends are tax that much lower rates
like half that rate in twenty twenty five percent Something
like that So three percent on bonds nets the big
taxpayers one point five percent and three percent on Davies
And that's more like two and a quarter percent something
like that Seventy five more basis points toe like you
know buy a lot with anyway Dividends They're good They
cushion stocks in the bad times and they add your
compound returns and you want to come pound at a
really high rate Kind of like you're compounding your lock 00:06:03.527 --> [endTime] Yeah Yeah
Up Next
What's a spinoff? Easy: Family Matters, Lavern and Shirley, Law and Order: SVU...oh. Financial spinoffs. Yeah, that's a different, less funny story...
What is the Math of Dividend Reinvestment? When deciding to reinvest dividend proceeds from a stock into purchases of additional stock, the fractio...