Apple Stock Split Causes Dow Jones Industrial Average Shuffle; Salesforce, Amgen, Honeywell To Make Entry

The S&P Dow Jones Indices, a division of S&P Global SPGI, on Monday announced certain changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) composition, effective Aug. 31.

What Happened: Three new stocks will be added to replace existing stocks in the DJIA index.

Cloud computing solutions provider Salesforce.com Inc. CRM will replace Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM, biotech company Amgen Inc. AMGN will replace Pfizer Inc. PFE, and Honeywell International Inc. HON will replace Raytheon Technologies Corp. RTX.

The decision to replace three stocks in the index came after Apple Inc AAPL declared a 1:4 stock split, which would also come into effect on Aug. 31.

Why It Matters: The iPhone maker is one of the constituents of the DJIA index and the company’s stock split decision could bring down the index weightage on the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) IT sector. With the new additions, S&P Dow Jones hopes to offset this reduction and remove company overlap in the index.

What's Next: To ensure consistency, new divisors will be used to rebalance the index, specifics of which will be available in the S&P Dow Jones Indices FTP (EDX) site on Aug. 28, according to the statement.

Price Action: At the time of the market close on Monday, the DJIA index was up 1.35% at $28,308.46.

Among the three new entrants, Salesforce.com shares traded 3% higher at $214.8 in the after-hours session Monday. Amgen shares traded 4% higher at $245, and Honeywell shares were up 3.8% at $165.5.