This work provides evidence on how negative correlated is diversification and enterprise value. Following Lang and Stulz (1994) methodology, our aim is to verify the correlation between firms' market value and diversification strategies. The negative relationship is observed for different measures of diversification and holds even if we control the effect of other variables known to be value drivers as investment, debt, profit and firm size. The results indicate that, as the focused companies, the highly diversified ones have also a greater value than the others. Finally, the contribution of this paper is that the negative diversification falls when it appears in more related segments and the effect of diversification on the enterprise value begins to be positive if we consider only the years of crises in our sample. We distinguished two consequences: non defined diversification strategies mean the worst performance and crisis mean better performance by diluting the risks impact. The study has some limitations because most of the Brazilian firms deal with highly correlated business portfolio.
Diversification; Tobin's Q; Enterprise value; Value drivers; Segment relatedness
