WOONSOCKET, R.I. — CVS Health said Wednesday it will split into two separate publicly traded companies, unwinding much of the sprawling pharmacy-insurance conglomerate it spent more than a decade building — and investors responded by wiping out more than a tenth of the company's market value in a single session.

The plan separates CVS's retail pharmacy chain from its healthcare-insurance and pharmacy-benefit-management operations, which include Aetna and Caremark. In the interim, the healthcare solutions business will keep the CVS Health name, while the retail pharmacy chain will be spun off as "CVS Pharmacy," according to the company's own announcement.

CVS shares fell 12.6%, closing at $79.94, as Wall Street digested the news, according to a Reuters report carried by Yahoo Finance. The split is expected to be completed in the first half of 2028, pending final approval from the CVS Health board and an effective registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company disclosed.

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Undoing the Aetna bet

The move effectively reverses the logic behind CVS's roughly $78 billion acquisition of health insurer Aetna in 2018, a deal meant to fuse pharmacy, insurance and clinical care under one roof. CVS explored a possible breakup once before, in 2024, amid investor pressure and thousands of job cuts, before shelving the idea. This time, the company is framing the split as a deliberate strategic choice rather than a response to activist pressure, though it comes as CVS — like rivals Walgreens and Rite Aid — has struggled for years with pharmacy reimbursement pressure and a wave of store closures nationwide.

CVS's own announcement cast the split as a way to let each business "move faster" without the complexity of managing both a retail footprint of thousands of stores and a national insurance and pharmacy-benefits operation at the same time. The company has not yet named leadership for the future CVS Pharmacy spinoff.

What's next

The separation requires sign-off from CVS's board and a Form 10 registration statement with the SEC, a process that typically takes well over a year for a company of CVS's size and complexity. Until the split closes, CVS Health will continue operating as a single company, and executives have not yet detailed how the roughly 300,000-person workforce will ultimately be divided between the two future entities. Shareholders will have a say once more details of the plan are finalized, and analysts said Wednesday they expect more clarity on timing and leadership in CVS's next quarterly update.