Anubhav Mittal on Strategic Divestitures and the Discipline of Knowing When to Exit

Capital allocation is not only about where to invest. It is equally about where not to remain invested. Strategic divestitures — the deliberate exit from businesses, assets, or positions that no longer serve the company’s core strategy or return requirements — are among the most consequential decisions a corporate development function can execute. They are also among the most systematically underexamined. Most corporate frameworks allocate analytical rigor to acquisitions and treat divestitures as reactive events, triggered by underperformance or external pressure. The most effective portfolio managers approach them proactively — as a standing discipline, not a last resort. Anubhav Mittal’s mandate at Archer Daniels Midland spans both ends of the capital allocation spectrum, encompassing acquisitions, divestitures, and joint venture restructurings as an integrated portfolio management practice.

Why Divestitures Deserve the Same Rigor as Acquisitions

An acquisition and a divestiture are, in analytical terms, mirror images of each other. The same questions apply: What is the business worth? What is the right timing? What are the tax, legal, and operational implications of the transaction structure? What are the risks of mispricing? The difference is that in a divestiture, the company is the seller — and sellers face a different information asymmetry than buyers.

A seller knows more about the business than the buyer. That information advantage cuts both ways. It enables a more accurate internal valuation, but it also creates a disclosure obligation that shapes how the divestiture process is managed. Choosing what to disclose, how to frame the business’s performance trajectory, and how to structure the sale process to attract credible buyers at a price that reflects the asset’s actual value — rather than its recent performance — requires the same quality of transaction expertise that acquisition work demands.

At ADM, Mittal leads a corporate development function that treats divestitures as first-class transactions. His role as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A covers the full portfolio lifecycle, including exits. That integrated mandate — evaluating portfolio composition, identifying assets that are more valuable to a different owner, and executing the sale process with the same analytical discipline applied to acquisitions — reflects a capital allocation philosophy where portfolio rationalization is a strategic tool, not a reactive measure.

The Strategic Logic of Portfolio Rationalization

Every large, diversified company accumulates businesses that made sense at the time of acquisition but whose strategic fit or return contribution has shifted over time. Markets evolve. Competitive dynamics change. The synergies that justified an acquisition a decade ago may have been fully captured — or may never have materialized. A business that was once core to the portfolio may become peripheral as strategy refocuses.

Identifying these situations systematically — rather than waiting for a business to deteriorate to the point where divestiture is obvious — requires a standing portfolio review discipline. The analytical work involves assessing each portfolio segment against the same return criteria applied to new investment decisions: Is this business generating returns above the company’s cost of capital? Is it likely to do so over the next planning horizon? Is the company the best owner of this asset, or would a different owner extract more value from it?

At ADM’s Nutrition Business Unit, where Mittal served as CFO with responsibility over an approximately $8 billion global business, the portfolio management discipline required exactly this kind of standing assessment — understanding which product lines, geographies, and customer segments deserved continued investment and which represented capital that could be redeployed more productively elsewhere. That business unit finance experience, combined with his current enterprise-level M&A mandate, positions Mittal to evaluate portfolio composition with both strategic breadth and financial precision.

Structuring Divestitures for Maximum Value Recovery

Once the decision to divest has been made, the structure of the transaction determines how much of the asset’s value the seller actually recovers. An outright sale to a strategic buyer, a sale to a financial sponsor, a carve-out IPO, or a joint venture reconfiguration each produce different outcomes in terms of proceeds, tax treatment, speed of execution, and retained obligations. Choosing the right structure requires an accurate assessment of the buyer landscape, the asset’s standalone financial profile, and the seller’s constraints around timing and retained liability.

The carve-out process for a large business unit is particularly complex. Separating shared services, transitional supply agreements, and intercompany financial relationships requires meticulous operational planning alongside the transaction execution. Missteps in carve-out planning create post-close disputes, retained costs, and stranded assets that erode the value the divestiture was meant to unlock.

Mittal’s experience managing complex, multi-function finance organizations — including controlling, operations finance, and commercial finance across ADM’s global Nutrition business — provides the operational context to anticipate where carve-out complexity accumulates and to structure the separation accordingly. The same attention to assumption quality that governs acquisition due diligence applies to divestiture planning: the assumptions embedded in the separation plan must be stress-tested before they become contractual commitments.

Divestitures as a Capital Redeployment Mechanism

The most important question a divestiture answers is not “How much can we get for this business?” It is “What is the best use of the proceeds?” A divestiture that generates strong proceeds but leads to poor capital redeployment decisions has not created value — it has shifted the locus of the problem.

At ADM, where Mittal leads enterprise capital allocation and investment governance alongside the M&A function, the connection between divestiture proceeds and redeployment decisions is explicit. Capital freed from a divested asset enters the same governance process that governs all enterprise capital allocation — evaluated against competing investment opportunities, return thresholds, and strategic priorities before being committed.

That integration of divestiture execution and capital reallocation governance reflects a portfolio management philosophy in which exits and entries are not separate decisions but parts of a single continuous capital deployment cycle. Managing that cycle with discipline — knowing when to exit, how to execute the exit, and where to redeploy the proceeds — is the full scope of what strategic capital allocation actually requires.

About Anubhav Mittal

Anubhav Mittal is a senior finance, corporate development, and value-creation executive with more than two decades of experience leading strategy, M&A, capital allocation, restructuring, and business transformation across global public companies. He currently serves as VP and Global Head of Business Development and M&A at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Previously, he held CFO-level and senior finance leadership roles within ADM and at Kellogg Company, and began his career at Booz & Company. He earned an MBA from Harvard Business School with a concentration in Finance and Strategy, and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, graduating in the top 5% of his class. He holds the CFA and CMA designations and is based in Chicago, Illinois.