After 10 months of planning, a slimmed-down version of ITT Corp. emerged Oct. 31 following the conglomerate”™s separation of its operations into three publicly traded businesses.
Three weeks removed from its transformation, ITT Corp. officials reaffirmed the company”™s commitment to keeping its headquarters in White Plains and said the new ITT Corp. will be able to capitalize on having fewer core operating sectors.
“Now we can really concentrate on where we spend our innovation dollars (and) where we spend our capital expenses to expand, and we can therefore grow the business faster and in a more focused way,” said Jenny Schiavone, a spokesperson at ITT Corp.
Three companies comprise what was once one of the world”™s largest conglomerates: in addition to ITT Corp., which continues as a stand-alone industrial products company, ITT Exelis Inc. inherits control of the defense technologies business and Xylem Inc. takes over the water technologies business. ITT Exelis and Xylem are headquartered in McLean, Va., and White Plains, respectively.
The spinoff follows several corporate breakups that have either been announced or completed this year, including McGraw-Hill Companies Inc., Kraft Foods Inc., Tyco International Ltd. and Sara Lee Corp.
The newly remodeled ITT Corp. will specialize in the design and manufacture of pumps, valves, switches, connectors and interconnects, monitoring and control systems, shock absorbers, brake pads, friction materials, and other technologies for aerospace, transportation, industrial and energy markets.
In overly simplified form, the company will make a number of specialized industrial parts and products that won”™t always be visible but that are vital to a range of products, said global communications officer, Kathleen Bark.
“These are definitely not consumer products; they are highly engineered, highly customized and they are things you don”™t always see,” Bark said.
Going back to the end of 2010, ITT Corp. had 40,000 employees and reported close to $12 billion in sales.
Today, the look of the company is quite different, with closer to 8,000 employees spread throughout the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, South America and Eastern Asia, including about 80 at its White Plains headquarters. Annual sales post-split are expected to be roughly $2 billion, which does not include sales figures for ITT Exelis or Xylem.
Schiavone said that for the company”™s leadership, the move was a no-brainer.
“The industries we were operating in were very, very different. We had a number of businesses that were in core industrial manufacturing, over half of our sales were in the defense industry and (we had) another large business that provided water technology solutions,” she said.
“Those businesses were extremely different and our board and our management decided that the value of the company could be increased by separating those three businesses” in efforts to deliver shareholders the best value, Schiavone said.
The separation was announced Jan. 12, 2011 and was finalized just three weeks ago.
Despite the overhaul, ITT Corp. will keep its headquarters in White Plains for the foreseeable future, Schiavone said, adding that the company wanted to ensure it could retain its management team as it made the separation official.
“That was one of the things we were real clear with our employees early on,” she said. “We have the benefit of some really great talent in this company. One of our goals was to make sure that the corporate headquarters continued to be located in a place where we could retain those people, so we are staying in this building and that decision was made early on.”
