Trend Ltd, the Tata group’s conservative retail chain, saw an improbable investor acquiring a parcel of shares on Tuesday.
MUMBAI : Trend Ltd, the Tata group’s conservative retail chain, saw an improbable investor acquiring a parcel of shares on Tuesday.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the wealthiest charitable foundation in the world, acquired 98,790 Trent shares for an aggregate value of Rs 4.47 crore (about a million dollars). Morgan Stanley’s FII unit was the seller.
Not a big deal, but the point to remember is the foundation has made only one Indian equity investment before —- 3.42 lakh shares of Geometric Software by spending Rs 2.46 crore.
The foundation, which has a corpus of $38 billion, is managed by Bill Gates Investment, a trust named after, and perhaps owned by, the Microsoft founder. It has to invest at least 5% of the monies in charitable activities every year.
A foundation spokesperson told DNA Money over phone from the US that the charitable institution and the investment trust operate at an arm’s length. “We don’t have any specific information on the deal. Both are different entities,” she said, while declining to be identified because she’s not authorised to speak.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invests monies it has not yet distributed for charitable purposes.
Early this month, the Trent shares were scraping 52-week lows of Rs 420. The share closed at Rs 464.70, up 3.87%, on Wednesday.
Recently, Trent was in the news when managing director Noel Tata announced an investment plan of Rs 2,000 crore through internal accruals for setting up 50 hypermarkets —- called Star Bazaar —- over a period of five years.
What’s also interesting about the foundation is its Warren Buffet connection.
The world’s savviest value investor is on its board of trustees by virtue of being its biggest donor. But he has no role in investment decisions.
Buffet has often been rumoured to have entered the Indian stock market, but has never made it yet.
The rumours reached a crescendo during the follow-on public offering of ONGC, and turned out to be just that.
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