SONY HAS SOLD 50% OF ITS SPOTIFY SHARES

Sony Music sold around 50% of its shares in Spotify during the company’s first three and a half weeks on the NYSE, raking in somewhere between $740m and $790m altogether, MBW’s Tim Ingham reports.

When Spotify launched its direct listing on 4/3, Sony Music owned 5.7% of Spotify’s stock, with 10,164,560 shares, selling 17.2% of those shares on day one, generating $260m.

Sony Music cashed in again prior to the parent company’s 4/27 earnings announcement, telling investors last week that it had sold “approximately half of the shares we owned from the listing date until now.”

Spotify’s shares hit their lowest daily level—$144.32—on 4/6, and rose to their highest point prior to the earnings call of $158.45 on 4/20. Ingham did the math, coming up with the $740-790m range, based on these monetary parameters.

The stock closed at $164.97 on 5/1, its highest point since briefly hitting $169 during the opening session, in an encouraging sign for its investors. That means Sony’s remaining 50% would bring in an additional $833m, as Ingham points out.

Sony Corp. said last week that it expects to “record an approximately 100 billion yen gain” from the sale of its Spotify shares. At current exchange rates, that equates to $911m. The company will record this profit under “other income” in its fiscal 2018 results, ending 3/31 of 2019.