the times | Saturday April 30 2022 K1 47
Business
Tom Howard, Martin Strydom
Elon Musk has sold shares worth
$8.5 billion in Tesla, whose market
value has fallen by more than $150 bil-
lion after the billionaire’s bid for
Twitter.
The giant social media group agreed
to a $44 billion takeover by the world’s
richest man on Monday.
Filings show that Musk, 50, has sold
9.6 million shares this week, about
5.6 per of his stake in the carmaker. It is
the first time the tycoon has sold any
shares since the end of last year, when
he polled his Twitter followers about
whether he should offload 10 per cent of
his stake. He said in a tweet that no
further Tesla sales were planned after
yesterday.
Musk did not say what the sales were
for or for how long he would hold off on
disposals. However, it is likely to be part
of his plan to finance the purchase of
Twitter in one of the world’s largest
leveraged buyouts. Questions have
been raised about how he will finance
the deal and the market is still to be
convinced that his takeover will suc-
ceed. Twitter shares closed at $49.02
last night, some way shy of the $54.20
that Musk is offering.
Musk has committed to providing
$21 billion in equity financing to buy
Twitter. A further $12.5 billion of debt
has been committed via a margin loan
secured by Musk against Tesla shares.
He is understood to be looking for
partners to share some of the costs,
although reports have cast doubt over
whether anyone will want to join him.
Tesla investors have been unnerved
by the prospect of Musk having to sell
part of his holding in the electric car-
maker he runs in order to finance his
buyout of Twitter. This month, Tesla
shares have fallen by 20 per cent, wip-
ing $175 billion off its stock market
¤commoditiescommodities currenciescurrencies
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80Dow Jones
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€1.1917 (+0.0070) ¤Gold
$1,909.07 (+23.13) $
2,200
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7,544.55 (+35.36)
8,000
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6,500world markets (Change on the day)
Brent crude (6pm)
$109.65 (+2.40)Mar 29 Apr 6 14 26 Mar 30 Apr 7 16 26 Mar 30 Apr 6 14 26 Mar 30 Apr 7 16 26 Mar 26 Apr 6 14 26 Mar 26 Apr 6 14 26A Chinese insurer, the biggest share-
holder in HSBC, has urged the
Asia-focused British bank to pursue a
break-up.
The move by Ping An, which owns
9.2 per cent of the FTSE 100 lender, is a
blow to Noel Quinn, the HSBC chief
executive, and Mark Tucker, its chair-
man. The Shenzhen-based insurer has
been an investor in the bank since 2016,
HSBC needs to break itself up, warns biggest shareholder
Ben Martin Banking Editor when it gradually started buying
shares.
It told HSBC’s bosses in private dis-
cussions recently that it believed the
bank’s Asian operations would attract a
much higher stock market rating if they
were split off from the rest of the group
into a separate company that is listed
and headquartered in Hong Kong.
It is understood that Ping An thinks
the risks that HSBC faces from being
stuck in the middle of rising tensions
between the West and China are weigh-
ing on its valuation.
The bank was founded in Hong Kong
in 1865 and, although based in London,
the former British colony is its single
biggest market.
Quinn is tilting the bank even further
towards Asia and has moved top
bankers to Hong Kong. Yet his strategy
has coincided with a clampdown on the
territory by Beijing through the imposi-
tion of a draconian national securitylaw two years ago. This has raised con-
cerns in the West about civil liberties in
Hong Kong and has prompted criticism
of HSBC in the UK after the bank
backed the security law.
It emerged last weekend that a lead-
ing HSBC shareholder believed the
bank should consider a break-up. The
identity of the investor remained a
mystery until yesterday, when it
became clear it was Ping An.
Ewen Stevenson, the HSBC financechief, said at the lender’s first-quarter
results on Tuesday that management
did not support the idea of a split: “We
don’t think a break-up of the bank
makes any sense at all.”
The bank said: “HSBC has a regular
programme of engagement with all our
investors and is committed to maximis-
ing value for all our shareholders. We
believe we’ve got the right strategy and
are focused on executing it.”
Ping An declined to comment.Billionaire sells 5% stake in carmaker to fund deal
Tesla value drops $150bn
after Musk’s Twitter raid
value. Last night it stood at about
$902 billion.
The wider technology sector also has
fallen in recent weeks, although Tesla
has suffered more than most. Apple
shares are down 6 per cent in April,
Meta, the Facebook owner, has slipped
by 7 per cent, while Amazon has fallen
by 11 per cent.
Tesla shares yesterday ended their
worst week’s performance since Janu-
ary by falling a further $6.75, or 0.8 per
Continued on page 48, col 5Talk grows
of Johnson
Matthey bid
Robert Lea Industrial EditorCity traders are betting that one of
Britain’s leading players in the green
industrial revolution could fall to an
American takeover, pushing its shares
up by nearly 20 per cent.
It was revealed yesterday that
Standard Industries, a privately owned
American conglomerate, had taken a
5.2 per cent, £180 million stake in
Johnson Matthey, one of the UK’s most
venerable companies that until last
December was a member of the elite
FTSE 100 share index.
Johnson Matthey’s expertise in the
chemicals industry has given it a
leading role in cleaning up automotive
vehicles’ pollution and emissions with
its materials for catalytic converters.
The industrial technology company
has pitched itself as a big player in the
hunt for technologies to enable alter-
native fuels to replace petrol and diesel.
After the declaration of Standard
Industries’s stake, there was no dis-
closure about whether it was a strategic
investment in a poorly performing
London-listed stock or something
more serious — a precursor to stake-
building and an eventual bid for
Johnson Matthey.
Traders took one look at Standard
Industries’s recent form and imme-
diately alighted upon the bid scenario.
This time last year Standard Industries
announced the $7 billion takeover in
cash of WR Grace, another specialist in
catalysts.
Johnson Matthey shares have been
close to 12-year lows after investors
appeared to lose faith following a
U-turn in its mission to make high-per-
formance batteries for the next genera-
tion of electric cars.
The company had spent more than a
decade and hundreds of millions of
pounds in research and development of
its much-vaunted eLNO technology
using electric-lithium nickel oxide
materials. It had got to the point that it
was prepared to invest in two assembly
plants in continental Europe before
Continued on page 50, col 5Tesla on slideTTTesla on slide
Impact of takeover on carmaker worries investorsNov Source: Refinitiv2021Dec Jan2022Feb Mar Apr7008009001,0001,100$1,200Twitter
accepts Musk's
$44bn offer224eiiMusk
offers
to buy
TwitterUS markets suffer big falls
Two of America’s
biggest stock markets
endured their worst
April since 1970, driven
down by mixed
corporate results and
fears about growth and
a rapid rise in interest
rates. The S&P 500,seen as a barometer of
US corporate health,
closed down 155.57
points, or 3.6 per cent,
at 4,131.93 last night; it
fell 8.8 per cent in April
for its worst month
since March 2020. The
Dow Jones industrialaverage fell 2.8 per cent
to 32,977.21, for an April
slide of 4.9 per cent.
The technology-biased
Nasdaq shed 536.89
points to 12,334.64, its
worst April since 2000
and a monthly drop of
13.3 per cent.