Conglomerate (company)
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A conglomerate is a large company that consists of divisions of seemingly unrelated businesses.
Conglomerates were popular in the 1960s due to a combination of low interest rates and a repeating bear/bull market, which allowed the conglomerates to buy companies in leveraged buyouts, sometimes at temporarily deflated values. Famous examples of the 1960s conglomerators include Ling-Temco-Vought, ITT, Litton, Textron, Teledyne, and Gulf and Western Industries. As long as the target company had profits greater than the interest on the loans, the overall return on investment (ROI) of the conglomerate appeared to grow.
For many years this was enough to make the company's stock price rise, as companies were often valued largely on their ROI. The aggressive nature of the conglomorators themselves was enough to make many investors, who saw a "powerful" and seemingly unstoppable force in business, buy their stock. High stock prices allowed them to raise more loans, based on the value of their stock, and thereby buy even more companies. This led to a chain reaction, which allowed them to grow very rapidly.
However, all of this growth was somewhat illusitory. As soon as interest rates started to rise in order to offset inflation, the profits of the conglomerates fell. Investors also noticed that the companies inside the conglomorate were growing no faster than they had before they were purchased, whereas the excuse for buying a company was often that "synergies" would lead to more efficiency. By the late 1960s they were frowned on by the market, and a major sell off of their shares ensued. In order to keep the companies going, many conglomerates were forced to shed the industries they had purchased recently, and by the mid-1970s most had been reduced to shells. The conglomerate fad was subsequently replaced by newer ideas like focusing on a company's core competency.
Most conglomerates have generally proven unsuccessful. One exception is General Electric, whose huge industrial equipment surplus was turned into a successful rental and leasing business. Cash flush during the 1980s, GE also moved into financing and financial services, which today accounts for half of the company's income. In some ways GE is the opposite of the "typical" 1960s conglomorate: the company was not highly leveraged, and when interest rates went up they were able to turn this to their advantage as it was often less expensive to lease from GE than buy new equipment using loans.
See also
nl:Conglomeraat (bedrijf)
