GSK complete Aspen sale, PIC now biggest shareholder

Aspen announced that the GSK sale had happened yesterday, I am more interested in who the buyer was. The announcement was pretty brief, the important line being: " .. its beneficial interests in Aspen Holdings now amounts to 12.4% of the total number of shares in issue." There you go, portion sold, they have taken all of their money off the table and now are still a significant shareholder. An old friend of the newsletter (he is not old, the newsletter is getting there) had this contribution:

"It is noteworthy how Big Pharma is selling assets. First Pfizer with Zoetis, Merck looking to unbundle/sell its animal health division and now GlaxoSmithKline selling down one third of its Aspen stake with probably more to follow. One can hypothesize any number of reasons, but GSK is probably the most puzzling. One would have thought that they would rather try & take Aspen out to give them unrivalled access to Aspen's extensive distribution business, rather like Kraft Foods (now Mondelez) buying Cadbury's more for its worldwide distribution facilities rather than its brands. Could Big Pharma be after funds as each strives to discover and deliver a blockbuster cancer drug that they can then sell at $100,000 per treatment course per patient, as is now beginning to happen? With aging demographics and an accelerating incidence of cancer, it might explain these moves."

According to the last annual report, page 102, that was published in October, Glaxo at 12.2 percent (now) will just be a whisker over the holding of Stephen Saad, who has 12.1 percent of the shares in issue. 55 132 421 shares to be exact, multiply that by the closing price last evening, 257.00 ZAR, and you get to 14.169 billion ZAR. 1.39 billion US Dollars. If Stephen Saad's holding in Aspen was a single listed company, it would slot into 81st place on the companies by market capitalisation, in-between Telkom and Omnia. Makes you think.


And the biggest shareholder of Aspen, that changes now to the GEPF, the government employees pension fund, who own 12.7 percent of the business. And in fact, remember that the PIC (who manage assets worth 1.4 trillion Rand) own listed assets of approximately 13 percent of the whole JSE. That is because 45 percent of their (the PIC's) assets are equity assets. Aspen up a touch today after having been thrashed nearly 4 percent yesterday. Not all bad, different shareholders, I am as keen to find out who those are.