New investor at Rocket Internet

Rocket Internet has just withdrawn from the stock exchange and not only had to justify itself to shareholders, but is also being sued. Now there is a new challenge: new investor Paul Singer holds 15 percent of the company and is presumably banking on a profitable offer. After Rocket Internet completed its IPO in October, the [...]
News by Lisa Marie Münster Lisa Marie Münster · Stuttgart, 30. December 2020

Rocket Internet has just withdrawn from the stock exchange and not only had to justify itself to shareholders, but is also being sued. Now there is a new challenge: new investor Paul Singer holds 15 percent of the company and is presumably banking on a profitable offer.

After Rocket Internet completed its delisting in October, the shares are now only traded on the Hamburg Stock Exchange. The company went public in 2014 at a price of 42.50 euros per share; the Samwer brothers, founders and owners, had offered 18.57 euros as a buyback offer for shareholders before the IPO. Not all of them accepted and have now been able to profit: The value of the share rose to over 21 euros on Tuesday and shares worth three million euros were sold.

The sudden boost is due to the new shareholder structure published by Rocket: investor Paul Singer holds 15 percent of the company via his Elliott fund. Singer is presumably counting on a higher buyback offer from Rocket. This could happen for various reasons: It is assumed that Oliver Samwer, head of Rocket Internet, wants all shareholders out of the company in the long term. To achieve this, he would also have to buy out Singer with his 15 percent. Samwer himself is the main shareholder with 49.6 percent. There is also pressure from another side: there are currently complaints from some shareholders about the stock market withdrawal. They are criticizing the fact that the buyback offer was relatively low and that the compensation came from the company itself and not from a shareholder as is usually the case. Oliver Samwer had also repeatedly emphasized that Rocket had no intention of withdrawing from the stock exchange. However, the stock exchange regulators did not see this as a problem.

The investor Singer is known for putting companies under pressure by buying shares, as he did with Bayer during the height of the glyphosate scandal. He became known worldwide in 2001 when he successfully bet on Argentina's state bankruptcy.


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