By Sachin Ravikumar
(Reuters) -THG’s second-largest shareholder BlackRock Inc is offloading nearly half its stake in the company at a 10% discount, in the latest sign of investor discontent with the British e-commerce group.
Deal bookrunner Goldman Sachs said on Tuesday BlackRock would sell 58 million THG shares at 195 pence apiece, a 10.3% discount to the stock’s Monday close and well below its initial public offering price of 500 pence.
BlackRock had a 10.13% stake of nearly 124 million shares as of mid-October, according to Refinitiv data, making the U.S. asset manager the No.1 institutional shareholder in THG and the second-biggest after THG founder and CEO Matthew Moulding.
Shares of THG, which went public in a bumper IPO last year and owns beauty retailer Lookfantastic and supplements firm Myprotein, were down 6.7% by 0845 GMT on Tuesday after hitting a record low of 198 pence.
BlackRock and THG declined to comment on the sale.
BlackRock’s deal follows a rocky month for THG in which its share price sank 35% in a single day after a poorly received investor presentation that focused on its e-commerce technology platform Ingenuity.
Investors were disappointed by a lack of specifics about the business during the presentation. Japanese venture capital giant SoftBank Group Corp, which took a stake in THG this year, has an option to inject $1.6 billion into Ingenuity at a valuation of $6.3 billion once it is spun off.
A series of measures by Manchester-based THG to soothe investor nerves, from naming a SoftBank executive to its board and pursuing a premium stock listing to Moulding giving up his “golden share”, have so far failed to stem the slide in its share price.
(Reporting by Sachin Ravikumar in Bengaluru; Editing by Ramakrishnan M. and Shounak Dasgupta)
