In July 2022, Stanley Black & Decker closed the sale of its commercial electronic and healthcare security businesses to Securitas for $3.2 billion in cash. The business was not failing. It had produced roughly $1.6 billion of revenue the previous year, and the price worked out to about sixteen times trailing adjusted EBITDA, which is not what a distressed asset fetches.
The usual reading of a sale like that is retreat: a company under pressure raising cash. Sometimes that is true. In these four cases it is the wrong read, and the difference matters to anyone making the same kind of decision at a smaller scale. Each of these companies removed a viable business in order to concentrate on the part of the portfolio where it could actually win, which is the same decision described in the guide to product portfolio strategy for manufacturers, executed at a size where the filings record exactly what happened.
What did Stanley Black & Decker actually sell?
A string of businesses over about two years, most of them sound. Security went to Securitas in July 2022 for $3.2 billion, automatic doors the same month for about $916 million, oil and gas in August, and the infrastructure business was agreed in December 2023 at $760 million.
None of those units was a casualty of a bad year. Security in particular had been improved over several years before it was sold, which is what produced the multiple, and the same is true of the doors business. The company was selling from strength in each case rather than clearing a shelf.
The company’s own filings describe the purpose plainly: to focus the portfolio on its leading positions in tools and outdoor and on engineered fastening. The proceeds went to debt reduction and to a $2.3 billion share repurchase, and the same period included acquisitions running the other way, notably MTD at $1.5 billion to expand its position in the outdoor category.
That combination is the part worth noticing. This was not a company shedding weight indiscriminately. It sold businesses that a buyer valued highly and bought into a category where it already had brands and distribution, which is what portfolio management looks like when it is being done deliberately rather than under duress.
It sold businesses a buyer valued highly and bought into a category where it already had brands and distribution. That is portfolio management, not retreat.
Why does Dover keep selling businesses that are not losing money?
Because it judges each business on whether Dover is the right owner, not on whether the business is profitable. Its filings say this directly: some businesses may create more value under a parent with greater presence and focus in that niche, and the company sells when the price reflects that difference.
The recent record fits the language. Dover reported no material dispositions in 2022 or 2023, then sold De-Sta-Co in March 2024 and completed the sale of its Environmental Solutions Group in October 2024 for $2.0 billion, a disposal large enough to be treated as a strategic shift and reported as discontinued operations. Management framed the ESG sale as reducing exposure to capital goods while moving the portfolio toward higher-margin priority platforms.
The timing of the two 2024 disposals against two quiet years is worth noting on its own. A portfolio policy does not require an annual transaction. It requires a standing question, asked of every business on a fixed cycle, with most years producing the answer that nothing should change.
Meanwhile the buying continued, with capital going into targeted niches such as clean energy components and precision measurement. The pattern is rotation rather than contraction: sell where someone else is the better owner, redeploy into platforms where Dover’s position is strongest. The test being applied is not profitability. It is ownership advantage.
What does a portfolio look like after that choice is finished?
Howmet is the end state. Following the 2020 separation that split Arconic’s rolled products business from the aerospace business, what remained was a company built around jet engine components, aerospace fastening systems, and airframe structures, with aerospace accounting for roughly 70 percent of 2025 revenue and commercial transportation about 15 percent.
The concentration is the strategy. Howmet’s own description of its capability is that it can produce more than 90 percent of structural and rotating aero engine components, which is a claim only available to a company that decided what it was going to be. A more diversified version of the same business would have a broader revenue base and no comparable position in any of it.
It is also a position built on qualification barriers rather than on scale alone. Parts that sit inside a certified engine are difficult to switch away from, and that difficulty is the advantage the concentration was designed to buy. Breadth would have diluted exactly the thing that makes the position defensible.
Concentration carries the obvious cost, and Howmet’s filings show it: the commercial transportation exposure is the cyclical piece, and it moves against the aerospace cycle rather than with it. That is the trade. A focused portfolio is more exposed to the fortunes of the thing it chose, which is only a good trade if the thing it chose is something it can win.
Why would a company separate half of itself?
Because two businesses in one company can each be held back by the other’s capital needs. Ingersoll Rand announced in April 2019 that it would spin off its industrial segment and merge it with Gardner Denver, completing the transaction in early 2020, after which the remaining climate business was renamed Trane Technologies.
What is instructive is that the industrial business was not a problem to be disposed of. It was combined with another industrial company under the Ingersoll Rand name, where it became the core of that company rather than a segment competing for attention inside someone else’s strategy. Both halves ended up somewhere they could be the priority.
For an operator the useful translation is smaller than a spin-off. A product line that needs a different sales model, a different capital profile, or a different pace of investment than the rest of your business is being held back by sharing a roof, and the remedy is usually to separate how it is run long before anyone considers separating who owns it.
The company had run this play before, separating its security business as Allegion in 2013, so the 2020 transaction was the second time it concluded that a good business inside its portfolio would do better outside it. That repetition is what distinguishes a portfolio policy from a one-time reaction to pressure.
Both halves ended up somewhere they could be the priority. A good business inside your portfolio can still be a business that would do better outside it.
What do the four decisions have in common?
Three things. Each company removed a business that was viable rather than broken. Each judged the business on whether it had the right to win in that market rather than on current profit. And each redeployed the proceeds into the part of the portfolio it had decided to be serious about.
Notice what none of them did. None of them cut a percentage across the board, which is the reflexive response to margin pressure and the one that preserves every position at a slightly weaker level. None of them waited for the business in question to deteriorate first, which is what makes a sale a distress sale and collapses the price. And none of them treated the decision as final: all four kept acquiring while they sold.
The reason the profitability test fails at this level is the same reason it fails at the product line level. Profit today records a position you already hold. It says nothing about whether you can defend it, and a business earning adequately in a market where someone else has the structural advantage is exactly the business that will be worth less in five years than it is worth to a buyer today.
What does this mean for a business without a filing requirement?
The same decision, minus the press release. Most industrial businesses have a product line or a segment that earns acceptably, requires attention out of proportion to its contribution, and sits in a market where a competitor is structurally better positioned. That is the asset these four companies sold.
What you do not get is the discipline that comes with a filing requirement, which is a real disadvantage and worth compensating for deliberately. Public companies restate the portfolio question every year in front of people who will ask about it. Private businesses can defer the same question indefinitely, and usually do, because nothing external forces it onto the calendar.
Run the test they ran. For each part of your business, ask what a customer in that market could name as your advantage, and ask whether anyone else would be a better owner of it. A segment where the honest answer to the first question is nothing, and to the second is probably, is a candidate, whether the exit takes the form of a sale, a wind-down, or simply moving your money and your engineering hours elsewhere.
The timing lesson is the one worth taking most seriously. Every one of these sales happened while the business being sold was still performing, which is why they commanded prices worth having. Portfolio decisions made after a business has visibly weakened are a different transaction entirely, and they rarely fund anything.
Every one of these sales happened while the business being sold was still performing. That is why they commanded prices worth having.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as Global VP of Product Strategy and Marketing. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books: The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
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