Tencent ADR tumbled 9% in morning trading on Tencent top holder Prosus to sell up to $14.6 billion stake.
Prosus NV plans to raise as much as $14.6 billion from the sale of shares in Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., further growing its war chest for new e-commerce deals.
The Amsterdam-listed firm will sell a 2% stake in Tencent, reducing its holding to just under 29% while remaining the biggest shareholder, according to a statement on Wednesday. The price range was set at HK$575.00 to HK$595.00, a discount to the last trading price of HK$629.50.
The deal will more than quadruple Prosus’s cash reserves from $4.6 billion as of the end of September.
Prosus is cashing on one of the all-time great venture-capital deals.Naspers Ltd., the company’s Cape-Town-based parent, invested just $32 million in Tencent in 2001, when it was an obscure internet firm. The shares are now worth about $239 billion.
While the decision has made Naspers the most valuable company in Africa, its market capitalization of about $109 billion lags well behind the value of the Tencent holding. The creation of Prosus was partly designed to narrow that discount, but the Amsterdam-based company too is dwarfed by the size of the stake in the WeChat creator.
Prosus has committed not to sell any further Tencent shares for at least the next three years, the company said. Naspers sold a similar size stake in 2018, a year before spinning off the shareholding and most of its other businesses into what is now Prosus.
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