Latest news with #spinoff
Globe and Mail
12-06-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Telus fails to deliver on Entwistle's IPO-based growth strategy
Would anyone buy another initial public offering promoted by long-serving Telus Corp. T-T chief executive officer Darren Entwistle? If the answer to that question is no, Mr. Entwistle's growth strategy at Telus is dead in the water. And it's hard to imagine investors stepping up for future Telus spinoffs after Tuesday's announcement that the parent company wants to put troubled offspring Telus International (Cda) Inc. TIXT-T out of its public market misery. Telus is offering to buy out shareholders in its subsidiary at a steep 86-per-cent discount to the price of its IPO, done with considerable fanfare just four years ago. Mr. Entwistle, a dominating personality who has been at the helm for 25 years, built Telus beyond its legacy phone networks by investing billions in subsidiaries focused on digital customer services, health care and agriculture. The idea was to incubate these businesses inside the Vancouver-based telecom, then launch them as public companies, with Telus shareholders reaping rewards from the value created on Mr. Entwistle's watch. Telus International – rebranded in 2024 as Telus Digital Experience – was meant to be the first in a series of spinoffs. Telus Health is up next, with an IPO anticipated as early as 2026. The incubator concept initially looked like a winner, as Telus Digital went public in 2021 at US$25 per share in what the parent company proudly heralded as the largest tech IPO in Toronto Stock Exchange history. At the time, Telus Digital's US$8.5-billion market capitalization rivalled that of the parent telecom. Execution failed to match ambition. Telus Digital proved a case study in value destruction. The company's challenges include a core business that runs call centres for clients such as retailers, hotels and banks. Artificial intelligence-based systems now dominate this space. Telus Digital proved slow to pivot, and customers moved on. On Wednesday, Telus reversed field by making a 'non-binding indication of interest,' or IOI, to acquire the 42.6 per cent of Telus Digital shares it doesn't own for US$3.40 each. Telus Digital shares promptly jumped 24 per cent Thursday to close at US$3.67 on expectations the parent company will be forced to goose its bid to get a deal done. Mr. Entwistle put a brave face on Telus Digital's face plant. In announcing the IOI, he said reintegrating the unit's tech expertise will benefit all of Telus's businesses, including telecom. While that may be true, buying back the subsidiary is an admission of failure. Telus set lofty goals for its diversification strategy, then failed to hit them. Telus proposes buying back Telus Digital for more than US$400-million Telus Health prepares to stand alone after years of acquisitions 'Today's rather dismal proposal has no 'congratulatory' terms that were to be found at the time of the IPO,' said analyst Tyler Tebbs at Tebbs Capital in a report. He said Telus is only offering to repurchase its subsidiary after failing to find a buyer for the business. Memories are long in financial circles. Mr. Tebbs compared the Telus offer to the ill-fated M&A at Time Warner Inc. in the recent past. He said the buyback 'is yet another example of a telecom/media company reversing a transaction done in much better times at the expense of shareholders.' In public markets, you're only as good as your last deal. Fund mangers got caught up in a craze for all things digital during the early days of the pandemic. That dynamic set the stage for a successful IPO at Telus Digital. The second time around, institutional and retail investors will be far more skeptical about buying when Mr. Entwistle is selling. To get an IPO done at Telus Health or Telus Agriculture, the parent company will likely be forced to accept a steep discount to the underlying value of the business, which defeats the purpose of the incubator concept. Yet without the ability to exit investments, Mr. Entwistle is running a debt-heavy conglomerate, anchored by a well-run but slow-growth telecom network that qualifies as critical infrastructure for the Canadian economy. Outside of founder-run businesses, it's hard to name a domestic public company more identified with its CEO than Telus. At Telus Digital, Mr. Entwistle's IPO-based growth strategy failed to deliver. The Telus board, chaired by former deputy prime minister John Manley, needs to ask hard questions about what comes next and who is best positioned to lead a business that has become the vision of a single executive.
Forbes
10-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
How A Spin Master Built A Solid Financial Growth Strategy For Kyndryl
If you're looking for a CFO with deep spinoff experience, David Wyshner is a good resource. He's worked on spinoffs as CFO at companies including XPO and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and is the first CFO for IBM spinoff Kyndryl. I talked to him about his work with spinoffs, the strategic opportunities they present, and how he's built a solid growth strategy for Kyndryl. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. It was excerpted in the Forbes CFO newsletter. What drew you to be the first CFO of Kyndryl? Wyshner: I've been involved in a number of spinoffs over time. Kyndryl is actually No. 6 for me on that list. It sort of happened accidentally at first, but lately it's been intentional that I've been joining organizations that were going through or thinking about going through spins. That's what XPO, Wyndham and Kyndryl have in common. It's really exciting to be involved in an organization that's going through a lot of change. It's a really formative stage, and the number of things that need to be done, that need to be decided, that need to be set up, that need to be started just makes it really exciting. Given the size, scale and complexity of Kyndryl, plus, the team that our CEO was assembling, made it a really exciting opportunity for me and I was thrilled to get the opportunity to do it. Kyndryl CFO David Wyshner. What are some of the things that are unique to a company going through a spin that you have experience in handling? There are so many opportunities to decide who you want to be when you grow up, and to start the process of getting there. In the case of Kyndryl, there were two really important elements. The first was: Culturally, how do we want to operate? How do we want to act and feel? The fact that Kyndryl's color is red, and that Kyndryl is spelled in a way that's a little bit funky and all lowercase. The fact that we're based here in New York City, not up in Westchester [County, New York] are all little signals that Kyndryl is different from IBM, its former parent company, that were all done intentionally. The culture we set up to be flat, fast, and focused, which aren't always things that our former parent was known for. It was a really important part of what we've set up and tried to organize leadership behaviors around. The second element was establishing our strategy as an independent organization. Our rationale for becoming an independent company is one of the best I've ever seen. Previously, we were a captive managed services provider, and that strategically was just not a good place to be. But as an independent company, we became an end-to-end services provider across a range of interconnected technologies. That independence to operate across a technology estate, rather than being constrained to a single parent company's technology, was a game changer. It increased our addressable market, changed what we could do for our customers. We weren't there just to provide help on IBM-related stuff. We were there to be a provider of services across their infrastructure and their tech estate, and we put in place a series of strategies to take advantage of the opportunity associated with that. You talked about going from working solely in the IBM ecosystem to across all providers. How do you build and scale a strategy based on going from a small tank to the open ocean? How have you done it? We're very focused early on building alliances with other leading technology providers, including the cloud hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and a number of other technology firms as well. It was a natural thing for us to do because as an infrastructure services provider, large organizations are all using hybrid IT technologies. The constraint around us as a captive didn't make sense, and our customers wanted us to be able to do more for them. Alliance partners wanted access to our customers and our customers wanted to do it. We all wanted to be moving in this same direction because it's a win-win-win for all of us. We devoted time and effort and resources to being a good partner to the alliance partners that we signed up. You talked about alliances, one of the three A's in your strategy. What are the other A's, and how does this strategy lay the groundwork for your plans? About three years ago, we announced the three A's: alliances, advanced delivery and focus accounts. I've established strategies before. Sometimes they're three parts, and you look back and say: One of them was exactly right, one was okay, one I might do all over again. The three A's were perfect for us. They were the things that strategically were important that would move the needle in terms of our results and competitive position. And the execution on them has been really strong. One was alliances, in building out our positioning across the tech estate. Advanced delivery was about driving automation and efficiency in how we deliver infrastructure services to customers. We've freed up thousands of people and saved over three quarters of a billion dollars a year by automating elements of what we do: Delivering services in a more automated and sophisticated way, and taking our service quality, which was always really strong to begin with, and making it even better than it was. That's been a huge win for us. It's been a driver of both margin expansion and continuing to have very strong customer satisfaction scores. The third element was our accounts initiative. When we became independent, we looked across our customer base and found that about 40% of our revenues were coming from accounts where we weren't making any money on a gross margin basis, which means we were losing money on a fully allocated pre-tax basis. Was it just because we were unlucky on 40%? No, it's actually because that's the way those deals had been priced and set up initially, often when our services relationship was part of a broader IBM relationship. That insight was some of the best news ever because it made it a fixable problem. We needed to get those accounts back to market pricing and levels of margin, and that's what we've been executing against ever since, adding to date, about $900 million of annual profit for us. Of all the initiatives I've been involved with, it's one of the best in terms of impact that it's had and the execution we've delivered. We still have some runway there because we operate under long-term contracts, so not all of our contracts have come up for renewal yet. The idea that we're at $900 million and still have some opportunity to deliver more is incredibly exciting. Two years ago in calendar 2023, our stock was up 87%. Last year, it was up another 67%. This year, we're up in the mid-teens. The three A's have been the core driver because we told people exactly what we were going to do. We've reported on it each quarter, and people were able to see the progress that we've made in a way that really has been great in terms of our do-to-say ratio: What we've done relative to exactly what we said we were going to do. What are some of the biggest challenges that you faced with Kyndryl, the spinoff, and getting through the first few years as an independent company? Three things come to mind. The culture that we had in mind was different from the culture we inherited as a spinoff. On the day that we spun off, by definition, our 90,000 Kyndryls were also 90,000 former IBMers. Driving cultural change in an organization of that size has been a good challenge for us to work on. We made a lot of progress, and we still have work to do there. The second challenge was in terms of setting up our strategy, landing on it, and then executing against it. That's where it made a lot of progress on the three A's. The three A's were primarily focused on fixing and turning around business that was break-even at the time of the spin. Now we're much more focused on growth, including revenue growth. That's the opportunity we're aggressively tackling now. We reported our first quarter in a while of positive constant currency revenue growth in March. We're targeting growth for this current fiscal year and fiscal '26 as well. That's the challenge that's front and center for us right now. Where do you see the company going in the next three years? I see us continuing to be a really important part of meeting our customers' IT needs. I like to think of a chief information officer as having two hats. One of them is [responsibility for] all the stuff that needs to run well, 24/7, efficiently, and with security and resiliency around it. The other hat that a CIO wears is helping to drive her organization's business outcomes. How do they drive growth? That whole first part—of making sure everything runs, is modernized, optimized, and is secure, resilient and supporting all the things that need to be done to help drive business outcomes—that's where we can play a larger and larger role. We do that at scale. We invest in it, innovate in that space. Any one of our customers, they're running one infrastructure, not hundreds or thousands of them. Given the scale we have, we are good at innovating in that space, driving positive outcomes there. As a result, I think we can be even more helpful to our customers. At the same time, that creates growth opportunities for us. It creates profit opportunities for us, and it makes us more important to the customers that we serve, in a way that can be very valuable to them as well. That's the opportunity that we're going to be going after. I'm really confident in our ability to seize that opportunity and play that role. We're a leader in our space right now. We've invested in AI, in particular around Kyndryl Bridge, to help drive additional benefits associated with our leadership. That's going to help us seize this opportunity over the next several years. How important is it to work with other members of the C-suite, especially with a CEO who was the CFO of IBM before the spinoff? It is so important for us as a team to be working together. For the finance team, the word that I tend to stress the most is collaboration, both within the finance team and with other parts of the organization. I try to lead by example there, in terms of the relationships I have with senior colleagues, but it needs to be much more multifaceted than that. We don't want to operate solely as silos that are connected at the top. We need this collaboration to happen at multiple levels, and across levels and functions as well. The aspiration is that I would like for people to report that interacting with finance is fun. I don't think we're ever going to get to that aspiration, but by having that as a goal and the aspiration, we can get to: At least they were collaborative. They had my back, they were looking out for me. They were responsive, they understood what I was trying to achieve. They asked questions, they were okay to work with. If we can achieve those things, they'll be really helpful. Even if we don't get 100% of the way there, we can drive a lot of collaboration and live the type of culture that we want to have. If you were to give some advice to other financial leaders, what would you say? One of the roles of finance is to drive great, impactful decision making across the organization. Where finance could be helpful is by analyzing, collaborating and prioritizing, and those are the areas I focus on. The quality of analysis that we can provide can support decision making. In fact, a lot of times, a good analysis makes what makes a decision really rather obvious. And so good objective analysis is really helpful. In organizations of almost any size, particularly larger organizations, collaboration is so critical to making progress. The third thing on my list is prioritizing. I think people and organizations can so easily get distracted by shiny objects, or devote more resources to things that are good or beneficial, but aren't as good or as beneficial as other things. And as a result, the idea of ruthless prioritization and making sure we're spending our resources—sometimes it's money, but it's often time, or organizational bandwidth for change—in a way that's really optimal. Analyze ruthlessly, collaborate ruthlessly—that's not an oxymoron—and prioritize ruthlessly.
Bloomberg
09-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Fuji Media Keeps Real Estate Spinoff in Play as Activists Circle
Fuji Media Holdings Inc. 's incoming president said 'all options' regarding its real estate operations remain on the table, including a possible spinoff along the lines of activist investor demands. The Japanese entertainment group last month rejected a shareholder proposal from Dalton Investments calling for a different slate of directors as well as a spin-out of the lucrative real estate arm. But the company has yet to finalize its long-term strategy, Kenji Shimizu said in an interview Monday.
Gizmodo
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Where Does ‘Doctor Who' Go From Here?
The end of the latest season of Doctor Who would be controversial for a good many reasons beyond its shocking cliffhanger ending—from its confounding narrative choices to its complete character re-writing of its latest companion—but perhaps what has made it reach another level of ire is that, for the foreseeable future, this might be it. Right now, the continuation of Doctor Who on TV is in about as unsure a place as it can be for the first time in 20 years. Of course, the show has contemplated disaster across those two decades, but we mostly learned of those moments well after the fact: on the public front, Doctor Who persisted into the institution it has become, in spite of it all. But Doctor Who ends its latest run of episodes without that public acknowledgement of its own inevitability. For all the talk of scripts and eventual, possible continuity, right now there is currently no further Doctor Who confirmed beyond a five-episode spinoff series, War Between the Land and the Sea. The show will not air this holiday season; for the first time since it returned, a third season of this Disney-BBC partnership era has not been commissioned. Doctor Who, on-screen at least, is currently standing on the edge of a proverbial cliff. That does not mean that Doctor Who is necessarily dead. Doctor Who will always live on in some form or another: it did back in 1989 when it was first cancelled, thriving in books, audio dramas, the brief spike of the 1996 TV movie, all before it came roaring back to life again in 2005. It also doesn't mean that there aren't options for the series, either, even in this moment of uncertainty. Let's explore a few of them. Option 1: Doctor Who Continues As-Is Of all the options on the table right now, this seems like the least likely. Not because of the perspective of Doctor Who's shaky reputation coming out if its finale, and its wild stunt-casting Hail Mary to close out Ncuti Gatwa's time on the show (it's currently unclear whether or not Billie Piper is going to be a full-fledged 16th incarnation of the Doctor; much like the show's current status, details about that are still up the air), but because at this point it's pretty much logistically impossible for the series to make a return any time soon unless it enters production immediately. A week out from the finale and with no official statement on the renewal of the BBC's licensing partnership with Disney—with the latter already having made it clear that there was going to be a review of Doctor Who's viewership across the latest season before any decision about the deal—it seems unlikely that we're going to hear anything soon, whether Disney backs out or carries on financially supporting the series. A Christmas special for 2025 is already out of the picture at this point; one was not included in the original agreement. And even if we got news of a deal imminently, the likeliness of a new season of Doctor Who being broadcast before 2027 narrows to the point of impossibility with each passing day. The question is, however, even if Doctor Who was renewed in the immediate future, should it continue as-is? It's become clear—and it's also clearly part of the reason why an official renewal didn't come with the conclusion of the latest season—that Doctor Who has struggled in the past few years to reclaim a wider audience again. Putting aside right-wing culture war accusations of overt 'wokeness' in the series (it has arguably been an era where Doctor Who's long-standing progressive themes have never been so purely surface-level), a mix of a streaming-first approach that has shaken up broadcast times in Doctor Who's home nation and plotlines that are failing to energize either diehard fans or new audiences has led to the series being on a ratings decline. In a period that was meant to be a new onboarding point for curious global audiences—a new Doctor, a new companion, a distancing for recent and further flung continuity threads—the series has instead wrapped itself in increasing insularity, building its dramatic climaxes on arcane connections to Who's past and season arcs that build towards the return of increasingly obscure old villains, while also paradoxically failing to capitalize on those returning characters. Even if Doctor Who was greenlit for more seasons, whether or not its current self is working would remain uncertain. Option 2: Doctor Who Takes a Break So maybe the show takes a break that's longer than the logistically enforced couple of years it would take to continue on as it has been. Whether that's three years rather than two, whether it's three or four or even five, it would give the show the chance to have a creative reset behind the scenes and return with a renewed plan for its future and a renewed energy with a completely new Doctor and companion. That doesn't necessarily mean that much changes behind the scenes, but it could depending on the length of the break. We have, at least, the upcoming War Between the Land and the Sea to act as something already made that could be broadcast in the place of a traditional season. But given the current uncertainty as to what Billie Piper's role in this transitional period could be—whether she's the Doctor at all, whether she's a regeneration similar to David Tennant's 14th and won't stick around long, or whether she is indeed a fully-fledged incarnation that will stay as the face of the series for multiple seasons—perhaps we could even see something akin to what happened with Doctor Who in 2009. Then, as the series prepared to transition between the exit of both its main star in David Tennant and its creative leadership in showrunner Russell T Davies, Who went on a quasi-break for the year, instead broadcasting four one-off special episodes throughout 2009, while a new creative team under Steven Moffat began working on getting the next era of the show ready for broadcast in 2010. Maybe after War Between the Land and the Sea we'll see a similar 'specials' era for Piper, before a return to regular seasons with a new incarnation of the Doctor. Regardless, it would give time for Doctor Who's creative team to take a look at the last couple of years of the show, see what's working and what isn't, and lay out a new plan for what the series could eventually look like upon its return. Option 3: Doctor Who Dies (But Not Really) Or maybe, this is it. In not having a deal renewed at all, whether with Disney's help or without it, Doctor Who is effectively cancelled as it was back in 1989. On screen Who goes out with Piper's smiling face cutting to credits, a more open-ended but similar conclusion akin to the Seventh Doctor and Ace walking off into adventures unseen at the end of 'Survival.' Of course, this means that we know that even if Doctor Who on TV is dead, it really isn't dead at all. Just as was the case nearly 40 years ago, the show's first wandering into 'The Wilderness Years,' as they came to be known in Doctor Who fandom, didn't really mean that Who ceased to exist. Virgin's New Adventures novels carried on the stories of the Doctor and Ace, and yet further beyond, providing a treasure trove of stories pushing the world of Doctor Who beyond the imaginings of its televised self. The Big Finish audio drama series began in 1999 and continues to this day, simultaneously giving Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor from the TV movie a whole life of adventures while also revisiting Doctors past, enriching their own histories with more stories and spinoffs. In fits and starts, we did still get glimpses of new Doctor Who media, from the cheesy reunions of Dimensions in Time, to the aforementioned attempted revival with the 1996 movie, and then things like the online web animation Scream of the Shalka in 2003. But while Doctor Who wasn't regularly on TV any more, it was far from dormant. We've already seen the series survive one such period, only to come back and change the face of genre television all over again. Who's to say it couldn't do the same again? After all, cheating death is part of the key to Doctor Who's longevity!
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The War Between the Land and the Sea: Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Russell Tovey Star in Trailer for Doctor Who Spinoff
Concurrent with the release of Doctor Who's twist-filled season finale, we also got a first trailer for the spinoff series The War Between the Land and the Sea, seen below. Announced back in July 2024, the five-part series stars Russell Tovey (Quantico) and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Loki) alongside fellow franchise vets Jemma Redgrave (as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart) and Alexander Devrient (as Colonel Ibrahim). More from TVLine Ncuti Gatwa Bids Doctor Who Farewell as Finale Ends With a Most Surprising Twist - Grade It! Save the Dates: Spidey's Return, Cocomelon's Move and More Nautilus Trailer: Captain Nemo Makes Waves in AMC's Jules Verne-Inspired Adventure Drama - Watch Mbatha-Raw made her franchise debut in a series of spring 2007 Doctor Who episodes, playing Martha Jones' sister Letitia aka Tish, while Tovey in April 2008 guested as Midshipman Frame. Spinoff creator Russell T Davies, though, has made clear they're playing new roles: 'This is not Midshipman Frame teaming up with Tish Jones.' Rather, Mbatha-Raw's character, a Sea Devil, is named Salt (heh), while Tovey's is Barclay. The full cast, revealed in August, also includes Ruth Madeley, reprising her Doctor Who role as UNIT Scientific Advisor Shirley-Anne Bingham, and Colin McFarlane, reprising his Torchwood: Children of Earth role as General Austin Pierce. The title of this offshoot was teased in the May 2024 Doctor Who episode 73 Yards, where Fifteen observed, 'The rocks and the water, it never ends — the war between the land and the sea'. The premise: 'When a fearsome and ancient species emerges from the ocean, dramatically revealing themselves to humanity, an international crisis is triggered. With the entire population at risk, UNIT steps into action as the land and sea wage war.' Said species is in fact the Sea Devils, classic Doctor Who villains that made their first splash in 1972. 'They wake up, and they see the state of the oceans that we have put it in,' Russell previewed. 'We have wrecked the place, and it is war, war on an epic scale.' Davies, the current Doctor Who showrunner, created the spinoff and penned it with Pete McTighe (A Discovery of Witches, Doctor Who). Dylan Holmes-Williams (director of Doctor Who's '73 Yards' and 'Dot and Bubble') directed. The spinoff will air exclusively on Disney+ where available, and BBC One and BBC iPlayer in the UK. Want scoop on , or for any other TV show? Shoot an email to InsideLine@ and your question may be answered via Matt's Inside Line!
