Lockheed grows and shrinks, all in one day.

New York — Lockheed Martin is the latest industrial giant to grow and shrink in one shot.

The $65 billion defense contractor on Monday announced it was buying United Technologies’ Sikorsky helicopter unit. At the same time, Lockheed said, it is exploring a sale or spinoff of its information-systems business.

Acquisitions and divestitures increasingly are a package deal for industrial companies as they seek to expand faster-growing businesses and shed those that are holding them back.

It is a move that is popular with shareholders: General Electric and Danaher both announced big acquisitions and breakups, and they are outpacing peers this year. Lockheed climbed about 2 percent on its deal news as investors cheered its tighter focus on defense hardware.

“Investors are asking for specialization,” Walter Todd, who oversees about $1 billion including industrial stocks as chief investment officer for Greenwood Capital Associates, said. “The ball starts rolling and it picks up speed as more and more companies do it and they’re rewarded for it.”

For Lockheed, the prospect of a sale or spinoff of the services is “the icing on the cake” to the Sikorsky purchase, said Howard Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies Group.

Lockheed’s information-technology and services operations include air-traffic management and commercial cybersecurity. They account for about $6 billion, or a little less than 15 percent, of the company’s estimated 2015 sales. It is unclear how much the unit might fetch in a sale, or whether it would be sold in one chunk or in pieces.

While the division’s margins may be lower than the rest of Lockheed, they are higher than the average for other providers of defense-related services, said Steven Cahall of Royal Bank of Canada.

“It’s a high- quality asset, and the larger companies will all certainly take a serious look at it,” Cahall, a New Yorkbased analyst, said. “But it would certainly be a big acquisition for them.”