Finance History | 5301 Stevens Creek Boulevard — Two Point One Billion Dollars to Split Hewlett-Packard

People treat Agilent as a life-sciences instruments house that has always been its own firm.

The company was carved out of Hewlett-Packard on this Santa Clara campus.

Agilent Technologies was incorporated in Delaware in May 1999. It took HP's test and measurement, chemical analysis, medical, and related units and left computing and printers behind.

On 18 November 1999 the new shares were priced at 30 dollars each. The offering raised 2.1 billion dollars in 1999 currency, then the largest initial public offering in Silicon Valley history.

The remaining stake went to HP shareholders on 2 June 2000. Holders of record received 0.3814 Agilent shares for each Hewlett-Packard share, with fractional shares paid in cash.

The split was a capital-structure decision. HP's board wanted a measurement company that could raise money and set prices without carrying a printer cycle, and a computer company that no longer had to explain oscilloscopes to the same investors.

The headquarters address is 5301 Stevens Creek Boulevard. The pin is the public edge of that campus. The buildings are an active workplace. Do not enter.

Keysight later took the electronic measurement line in a 2014 separation. Agilent kept the laboratory instruments.

The mechanism is a carve-out IPO that turned one conglomerate share into two listed claims on two different cash-flow machines.

Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Agilent headquarters campus.