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Castle & Cooke Stock Dives on News It Won’t Sell Dole

By MARIA L. La GANGA and TOM PETRUNO
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TIMES STAFF WRITERS

One day after announcing that it will not sell Dole Food Co. after all, Castle & Cooke Inc. was one of the biggest losers on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, with a share price that plummeted 14%.

Castle & Cooke is the parent of produce giant Dole and Oceanic Properties Inc., a development firm that owns the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Castle & Cooke stock dropped $4.625 per share in heavy trading to close at $29. Only two other stocks suffered bigger percentage drops on the Big Board.

The precipitous fall was expected, analysts said, because the Los Angeles-based company has long been a favorite target of arbitragers, traders who actively buy and sell takeover stocks or shares in companies undergoing structural change.

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“You have to realize that the thing that pushed the stock up over the last year and a half was real aggressive ‘arb’ buying,” said Larry Selwitz, managing partner of Fin-Com, a Newport Beach investment consulting firm. “Today, they just unloaded.”

Selwitz contends that the arbitragers will be back because there still are prospective buyers for Dole, the dominant worldwide producer and distributor of fresh produce.

It is the world’s largest pineapple producer and No. 2 in bananas and citrus.

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Maria L. La Ganga

Maria L. La Ganga is the deputy managing editor for California and Metro, overseeing the Los Angeles Times’ largest editorial department. She joined The Times in 1981 as an academic intern, splitting her time between the former Metro section and National Dragster, the official publication of the National Hot Rod Assn. She has served as Seattle bureau chief, San Francisco bureau chief, edited in the Business section and pitched in on six presidential elections, five for The Times and one for the Guardian. La Ganga left The Times in 2015 and returned in 2018 after a brief hiatus during which she wrote for the Guardian and the Idaho Statesman. She was named city editor in 2022 and promoted to her current role in 2024. La Ganga graduated from Granada Hills High School in the San Fernando Valley and Cal State Northridge, where she studied English literature and journalism.

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