What is asset stripping?

[dolgoruky]

Can anyone out there give me an explanation of what "asset stripping" is and how it works in practice? I'm really struggling to get my head around this concept. I've read a lot about this in relation to Russia, but I can't figure out how people get away with it?

Muchas Thanks!

[happyslug]

1. "Asset stripping"

Is best defined as whenever a Company is taken over by someone else (generally a Corporation but can to an individual) and than the assets of that company is sold off at a profit.

Now most companies are worth more than the total of their assets. Basically because the assets are integrated together to make a profit, but some companies (generally do to bad management) have more assets than the value of the company. The first type of Company is rarely "Stripped" of assets for you will lose money, the later type of company is the target of the Stripping.

A Classic example is a poorly run company whose stock is worth $50 million but whose land, machinery and inventory can be sold for $100 million. Someone buys the company for $50 million and than sell off the inventory, the land and the Machinery for $100 million and leaves an empty shell of the company behind, stripped of all assets and worthless.

Prior to the 1990s Assets stripping was viewed as "good" for it permitted corporate raiders to move in and take over badly managed companies and sell their assets to companies that can make money with them (Or a target of such a takeover would sell the assets themselves for the money to fight off the take over). Given the greater profitability this cause. this was a very good policy in the 1980s. The problems is that by the 1990s the only assets left in almost any major Corporation was its pension plan for its employees.

Thus in the late 1990s Corporations started to go after these Pension Plans, saying they were over funded. Corporations started to move the pensions from "Defined Contributions plans" (Which set how much the corporation was to pay) to "Defined Benefit Plans" (Which were paid into by the corporation to a level that would pay the pensioners a set pension). Defined Benefit Plans(Given the jump in the stock market of the 1990s) were cheaper to fund than Defined Contribution plans. The problem with Defined Benefit Plans was when the stock market fell, so did the money in the plan. The "Savings" in the switch from defined Contributions to Defined Benefits disappears, but the assets saved in the switch had already been spent by the Corporations (on things Other than their employee's pensions).

This later case is what the term "Asset Stripping" has come to mean today. The Stripping of "Excess" Pension assets back to the Corporation and back to the stockholders leaving the Employees stuck with an underfunded pension plan. Thus today Pensions are the most likely assets to be stripped today from a Company, and the reason for the recent concern of "Assets Stripping".

[Mike03]

2. Kick

for interest and importance. Thanks for the explanation.