The industrial conglomerate DuPont is splitting in two.

DuPont produces products like solar panel components and Kevlar, and has a market value of nearly $57 billion. But in recent years, even as it increased its focus on higher-growth areas like agriculture and nutrition, a large portion of its revenue still came from the more volatile sale of conventional industrial products.

On Thursday, DuPont said it would spin off its performance chemicals segment into a new publicly traded company. The unit — which makes a pigment that turns paints, paper and plastics white, as well as refrigerants and polymers for cables — generated about $7 billion in revenue in 2012. But prices for its pigment products plunged in the second quarter, sending operating profits for the unit down 56 percent.

DuPont announced in July that it would explore “strategic alternatives” for the unit.

Soon after, the activist investor Nelson Peltz revealed that his fund, Trian Partners, had previously acquired a stake in DuPont. His holding of nearly six million shares was worth about $345 million at the time of the investment, but represented less than 1 percent of the company. Mr. Peltz was later reported to have increased his stake to 2.2 percent, owning more than 21 million shares, according to The Wall Street Journal…..

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What do you call the man who is trying to sabotage Chrysler’s initial public offering by threatening to harm the company, perhaps fatally, if the offering is completed?

You call him Chrysler’s chief executive.

There has never been a proposed I.P.O. like Chrysler’s.

How is it different?

First, the preliminary prospectus filed by the company this week has only one underwriter listed, JPMorgan Chase. A typical offering by a large company will have at least a few underwriters. Every investment bank wants some of the profits, and the company wants maximum distribution. When General Motors, out of bankruptcy and newly profitable, went public in 2010, 10 underwriters were listed on the first prospectus, including all the big ones. Many more were added before the offering took place.

Here, it is quite likely that the rest of Wall Street stayed away because they feared alienating the very company whose stock was being sold.

Second, the G.M. prospectus, as with every other I.P.O. prospectus I have ever seen, tried to put its best foot forward. Within the bounds of securities laws, the prospectus writers did their best to attract investors. Chrysler’s, within the same bounds, is clearly aimed at alienating investors….

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the lender that lost almost $2 billion during Chrysler Group LLC’s 2009 bankruptcy, is now its chief adviser as the automaker’s two owners haggle over its value.

JPMorgan will advise Chrysler in the event of its sale to majority shareholder, Fiat SpA, said people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The bank was also listed this week as the lead underwriter of an initial public offering of Chrysler shares owned by the company’s other shareholder, a United Auto Workers retiree trust.

The dual role highlights the complicated path Chrysler has been forced to take to resolve a dispute between its two backers. Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive officer of both Chrysler and Fiat who has spent four years seeking to merge the companies, is at loggerheads with the UAW’s trust over the value of its 41.5 percent stake in Chrysler. Letting public investors put a price on the stake, through the IPO process, is one way to resolve the matter…..

Read the rest of the article at Bloomberg.

BlackBerry Ltd. (BBRY), once valued at $83 billion, may be stuck with the cheapest valuation ever for a North American technology or telecommunications takeover.

The smartphone maker said yesterday it reached a tentative agreement for a $4.7 billion buyout by a group led by Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. (FFH), its biggest shareholder. Including net cash, the proposal values the Waterloo, Ontario-based company at an 80 percent discount to its book value and just 0.17 times its sales, the cheapest revenue multiple on record among similar-sized North American telecommunications or technology acquisitions, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

While the company has six weeks to seek other bids, Pacific Crest Securities said investors should be happy to get the $9 a share that Fairfax is offering. Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins, who took over in January 2012, didn’t publicly disclose the company was for sale until last month after almost a year of canvassing potential buyers. Now, BlackBerry has posted a string of quarterly sales declines and lost almost $79 billion in market value as it fell behind Apple Inc. and Google Inc. Last week, BlackBerry said it will cut a third of its workforce and take a writedown of as much as $960 million….

Read the rest of the article at Bloomberg.

The companies said they extended the date by which either airline could terminate the merger pact to either January 18, 2014, or the 15th day following the entry of a court order approving the merger should it be entered on or before January 17, whichever is later.

The previous termination date for the deal was December 17.

Should the U.S. district court hearing the government lawsuit rule against the merger, the carriers said either party may end the agreement five days after the entry of an order prohibiting the deal….

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Judge Sean H. Lane of the United States Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan confirmed American’s proposal to exit restructuring proceedings nearly two years after the carrier filed for bankruptcy. As part of the plan, American agreed this year to merge with US Airways, a move that received the backing of creditors as well as its three main labor groups.

But the merger was challenged by antitrust regulators who filed a lawsuit in August to block it on the grounds that it would harm competition and passengers. The airlines have vowed to fight the challenge and a trial is scheduled for November before a separate federal court in Washington.

Thursday’s ruling was supposed to cap a two-year process after American sought court protection to reorganize its business, cut costs and rewrite labor agreements in November 2011. It had initially vowed to emerge as an independent airline, but eventually succumbed to the efforts by US Airways to merge.

Updated, 9:02 p.m. | Both carriers have argued that they needed to combine their networks to be able to better compete with Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, both bigger carriers that completed mergers of their own in recent years.

The elaborate plan was thrown off in August when the Justice Department’s antitrust regulators unexpectedly challenged the merger. It was the first time that regulators had sought to block an airline merger since 2001….

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For companies looking to raise money through the debt markets, and the bankers egging them on, it seems no sum is too large.

Verizon Communications shattered records and shook up the bond world on Wednesday when it sold $49 billion of investment-grade corporate debt at one time.

It was the largest deal of its kind, exceeding Apple’s $17 billion bond sale in April and illustrating the degree to which low interest rates are enabling corporations to borrow money inexpensively.

Verizon undertook the huge sale of corporate debt as it moves to finance its $130 billion deal to buy out Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in their Verizon Wireless joint venture.

The ease with which Verizon raised so much money caught even longtime market participants by surprise and fed speculation that more companies might tap the debt markets before interest rates begin to rise, as is expected.

“We’re starting to see the animal spirits pick up again,” said Kathy Jones, a fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab. “Usually, once it gets going, it doesn’t let up.”

One banker involved in the offering said he was counseling corporate clients that now was an ideal time to raise more money for acquisitions.

“From an M.& A. perspective, nothing is out of reach,” he said. He spoke anonymously because he did not want to damage his relationship with his clients. Verizon’s buyout of the Vodafone stake in the wireless business — the third-largest corporate acquisition after Vodafone’s $203 billion takeover of the German cellphone operator Mannesmann in 2000, and the $182 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2001 — was in the works for years, but it was finally struck last week, in part because Verizon wanted to take advantage of low interest rates while they lasted….

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Hilton Worldwide Holdings, the hotel company owned by the Blackstone Group, filed for an initial public offering on Thursday, seeking to raise at least $1.25 billion in what will be one of the most closely watched I.P.O.’s of the year.

Though details of the offering were not yet available, Hilton could be valued at about $30 billion once it goes public, capping a remarkable turnaround for what was once considered one of the worst deals of last decade’s private equity boom.

Blackstone took Hilton private in 2007, paying $26 billion for the company, which is based in McLean, Va. The deal was among those that came to symbolize the outsize ambitions of buyout shops in the years before the financial crisis as firms including Blackstone went after ever-larger targets.

Hilton did not disclose the precise sum it was looking to raise or how it intended to price shares. But Blackstone does not intend to issue so many shares that it loses control of Hilton. Instead, the private equity firm will continue to own a majority of the voting shares, allowing it to control the makeup of the board.

With comparable hotel chains like Starwood and Marriott trading at about 12 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, and Blackstone growing at a healthy clip, its valuation could be about $30 billion by the time shares start trading, which is likely to be sometime early next year….

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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s $7.2 billion takeover of Nokia Oyj (NOK1V)’s handset business cost shareholders more than twice that as it dashed hopes for a fresh start under Steve Ballmer’s successor.

The world’s largest software company lost $18 billion in market value since the purchase of Nokia’s mobile-phone assets was disclosed, erasing all of the gains that followed the announcement last month that Ballmer is retiring, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The agreement cements the departing chief executive officer’s shift toward the more volatile consumer-device business and leaves little room for his successor to take a different tack, Atlantic Equities LLP said.

Microsoft is chasing growth in a market already dominated by Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc. (GOOG) with devices that generate lower returns than the company’s business-software division. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is returning to Microsoft as part of the asset sale, making him Ballmer’s most likely successor and signaling that the company is in smartphones for the long haul, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. said, even as some shareholders say that strategy is misplaced…..

Read the rest of the article at Bloomberg.

In buying out its longtime partner, Vodafone of Britain, the telecommunications giant is also striking a takeover more than a decade in the making, taking advantage of receptive debt markets and its own strong stock.

And Vodafone will be flush with cash to reinvest in its own businesses and to buy competitors in Europe and emerging markets.

The roughly 100 million Verizon Wireless customers probably will not see any change in their services, at least at first. But the telecommunications industry is very much in flux as new competitors like SoftBank of Japan have entered the market, while new opportunities for wireless services have emerged. Verizon viewed gaining full control of its biggest business as essential to addressing those trends. In the most recent quarter, wireless services accounted for $20 billion of the company’s nearly $30 billion in revenue.

Among its plans is bundling mobile broadband services with wired offerings like high-speed, fiber-optic connections.

“There’s a big phase of growth in the U.S. telecom market,” Lowell C. McAdam, Verizon’s chief executive, said in an interview. “The timing was perfect for us.”

The deal is enormous by any measure, with the price nearly equaling Verizon’s entire market value. As part of the complex deal, Verizon agreed to pay $58.9 billion in cash and an additional $60.2 billion worth of its shares to Vodafone, the latter of which will be distributed to Vodafone’s shareholders. Verizon will also sell its minority stake in Vodafone’s Italian business for $3.5 billion, as part of a series of smaller transactions tied to the deal. The amount it is paying is merely for 45 percent of Verizon Wireless, implying that the wireless unit is being valued at nearly $290 billion.

Vittorio Colao, chief executive of Vodafone, told reporters on Monday that the deal offered good value for his shareholders. “It was a good move for both partners, and we were able to find the right price,” he said….

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