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TUI sells rest of Its shares in Hapag-Lloyd AG
It is the end of a turbulent chapter in the 170-year history of the company. At the beginning of the week, TUI AG, the tourism company to which Hapag-Lloyd belonged between the late 1990s and March 2009, completely divested itself of its remaining shares in the liner shipping company. The last 8.5 million shares were sold to other investors for €244.4 million. Since late March, approximately 6 million Hapag-Lloyd shares had changed owners in transactions that brought TUI an additional €162.3 million.
It is not clear exactly who the new shareholders are who now collectively own the 7.9 percent share in Hapag-Lloyd that TUI recently had. However, the shares might have gone into the pool of free float shares. This pool contains all the shareholders who own a share of less than 5 percent in the company.
TUI AG had originally intended to sell all its shares in Hapag-Lloyd in 2008. However, in October of that year, right after the purchaser – the so-called Albert Ballin Consortium made up of banks and insurance companies in Hamburg, the entrepreneur Klaus-Michael Kühne, and the City of Hamburg – had been found, the major banking and global economic crisis broke out. As a result, TUI was initially only able to sell the majority (roughly 56 percent) of the shares in Hapag-Lloyd to the consortium, which assumed ownership of this block of shares in March 2009. In 2009, during the difficult economic and financial crisis, TUI was forced to assist Hapag-Lloyd once again. Then, in the years following the crisis, TUI was able to sell blocks of shares to Klaus-Michael Kühne and the City of Hamburg, both of which continue to number among our most important anchor shareholders.
Incidentally, TUI (then still named Preussag AG) had only purchased Hapag-Lloyd on account of the tourism-related lines of business and holdings that it wanted to acquire – most importantly Hapag-Lloyd owned 30 percent in Touristik Union International, in short: TUI. The original plan had been to get hold of the tourism business and re-sell the shipping-related parts of the company very quickly.