US billionaire George Soros’ fund has sold most of its stake in the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴), according to regulatory filings on Friday.
In its quarterly statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Soros Funds Management LLC said that as of June 30, it had sold all but nearly 60,000 Alibaba shares, valued at US$4.88 million. At the end of March, the fund still had 4.4 million shares valued at nearly US$370 million.
Similarly, the Tiger Global Management LLC investment fund reduced its stake in the Chinese group from 6.7 million shares at the end of March to just 93,494 shares three months later, filings show.
Alibaba reached historic highs in November last year, two months after its initial public offering on Wall Street, but it has since lost 37 percent of its value. The group’s latest quarterly results, published this week, showed a more pronounced slowdown than expected in sales growth, disappointing Wall Street.
The two largest shareholders of Alibaba are still Japan’s Softbank Corp — with 31.75 percent at the end of last year — and Yahoo Inc with 15.27 percent.
As China’s stock market took a free fall this summer, some big money managers looked to sell shares of two of the largest Chinese tech companies listed in the US — Alibaba and Baidu Inc (百度) — during the second quarter.
The shares of both Alibaba and Baidu are down sharply since the beginning of the second quarter. The two companies were once the darlings of a group of hedge funds known as the “tiger cubs,” hedge fund managers seeded by the billionaire investor Julian Robertson, which include Coatue Management LLC, founded by Philippe Laffont, and Tiger Global Management, founded by the investor Chase Coleman.
Coatue sold 2.2 million shares in Baidu, China’s biggest Internet search company — roughly 74 percent of its stake — in the quarter that ended June 30, according to a regulatory filing on Friday.
Other so-called tiger cubs sold some of their shares in Baidu and Alibaba as well, including Viking Global Investors LP. The hedge fund, led by O. Andreas Halvorsen, who once worked for Robertson, sold 1.1 million Baidu shares and also 902,981 Alibaba shares.
Additional reporting by NY Times News Service
ISSUES: Gogoro has been struggling with ballooning losses and was recently embroiled in alleged subsidy fraud, using Chinese-made components instead of locally made parts Gogoro Inc (睿能創意), the nation’s biggest electric scooter maker, yesterday said that its chairman and CEO Horace Luke (陸學森) has resigned amid chronic losses and probes into the company’s alleged involvement in subsidy fraud. The board of directors nominated Reuntex Group (潤泰集團) general counsel Tamon Tseng (曾夢達) as the company’s new chairman, Gogoro said in a statement. Ruentex is Gogoro’s biggest stakeholder. Gogoro Taiwan general manager Henry Chiang (姜家煒) is to serve as acting CEO during the interim period, the statement said. Luke’s departure came as a bombshell yesterday. As a company founder, he has played a key role in pushing for the
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the
GLOBAL ECONOMY: Policymakers have a choice of a small 25 basis-point cut or a bold cut of 50 basis points, which would help the labor market, but might reignite inflation The US Federal Reserve is gearing up to announce its first interest rate cut in more than four years on Wednesday, with policymakers expected to debate how big a move to make less than two months before the US presidential election. Senior officials at the US central bank including Fed Chairman Jerome Powell have in recent weeks indicated that a rate cut is coming this month, as inflation eases toward the bank’s long-term target of two percent, and the labor market continues to cool. The Fed, which has a dual mandate from the US Congress to act independently to ensure