Advance Auto Parts cut its dividend by 83 percent in November 2023 and the stock fell 35 percent in a single day. The company that had been paying shareholders $1.50 per quarter dropped to $0.25. That wasn't a surprise to anyone watching the operational metrics — the company had been posting declining comparable store sales, margin compression, and inventory management problems for years — but the speed of the correction still stunned the market. Founded in 1932 by Arthur and Charles Taubman as Advance Stores Company in Roanoke, Virginia, the company grew through seven decades of acquisitions to become the second-largest auto parts retailer in the United States behind AutoZone. The 2014 acquisition of General Parts International — which included the Worldpac commercial distribution business and the Carquest store network — was supposed to create scale that translated into operational advantage. Instead, integrating those businesses proved far harder than management anticipated, and the complexity they added outweighed the combined efficiencies. Shane O'Kelly took the CEO role in late 2023 and immediately announced a restructuring plan that included closing hundreds of underperforming stores and, critically, divesting Worldpac for $1.5 billion in 2024. The divestiture reduced revenue from $9.09 billion to $8.60 billion but stripped away a business that had been generating integration costs without generating the promised commercial leverage against AutoZone and O'Reilly. With 40,000 employees and $8.60 billion in revenue against a $3.4 billion market capitalization, Advance Auto Parts is priced at roughly 0.4 times revenue — a valuation that prices in both the restructuring costs and significant uncertainty about whether the core retail auto parts business can achieve the margins that its better-run competitors consistently demonstrate.