In recent years, the rapid change in business environment makes a lot of enterprises accelerate their restructuring for their survival and external growth in order to maximize their corporate value through the increase of the profitability and cash fl...
In recent years, the rapid change in business environment makes a lot of enterprises accelerate their restructuring for their survival and external growth in order to maximize their corporate value through the increase of the profitability and cash flow of the enterprises. Restructuring is divided into corporate expansion, through merger & acquisition, and downsizing through sell-off.
There have been hot discussions over corporate downsizing, especially sell-off, which has not been studied fully enough for lack of a sample of research data in relation to the systematic trait in our country.
In addition, the domestic investors, trying to cope with the change in business environment, are changing their ways of decision-making on their investment into the reasonable ones which make much of intrinsic value of an enterprise. Therefore, the studies on how the public announcement of sell-off by an enterprise has effect on the stock prices are very suggestive.
Accordingly, this study attempts to find out the investors' reactions to stock trading by way of the analysis of the effects that the public announcements of listed companies in our country have on the stock market as well as the extent of the role of the public announcement as an informative source to the investors through the analysis of the effects of sell-offs according to their types and motives.
This study has been carried out by means of both philological and positive method. The reactions of stock price to the announcements of sell-offs by enterprises, based on the average abnormal excess returns(AR) and the cumulative average abnormal returns(CAR), have been analysed in a positive way through the daily data of stock prices, while the expected return rate in the course of calculation of excess returns is estimated depending on the model of the stock market.
The paper's database of sell-offs were obtained from the public notification of Korean Stock Exchange or the newspaper of Korea Listed Companies Association from 1991 to 2000.
The results of empirical analysis of this study are as follows;
First, the full sample of 106 sell-off events show that they reap significant positive excess returns of +5.27% from these transactions (-20, 0). It proves that sell-offs, on average, are firm value enhancing activities.
Second, this study reveals that sell-offs can be value destroying, or value enhancing on the motive underlying sell-off. From each subsample divided by the use of sale proceeds of sell-off type, the evidence shows that core business-originated sell-offs increase stockholder wealth +1.58% CAR, and decreasing leverage originated sell-offs increase stockholder wealth with +11.39% CAR, but operating fund supply-originated sell-offs increase stockholder wealth -2.78% CAR.
This study has the limit that the sample period (-300, +10) was too short to explain all the phenomena of sell-offs. From this study we can conclude that enterprises should centralize their power upon a core business to survive rather than diversify excessively in these competitive days.