On June 25, a spokesperson of Panasonic Corp said that the Japanese company sold its stake in electric car maker Tesla Inc for about 400 billion yen in the year ended March.
The sale came as the bicycles-to-hair dryers conglomerate was seeking to reduce its dependence on Tesla and raise cash for investing in growth.
Elon Musk’s Tesla dominates the Panasonic’s battery business but the firms had tense relationships at times with the executives trading barbs publicly.
In 2010, Panasonic bought 1.4 million Tesla shares at $21.15 each for $30 million, which was worth $730 million at the end of March 2020. The shares gained seven fold since then and have closed up at $679.82 a piece on Thursday.
Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute said that the impact of crypto assets might have pushed Tesla’s share price above it’s intrinsic value, making it a good time to be sold.
In February, Elon Musk said that his firm had bought bitcoin and would take payments in cryptocurrency, which he later reversed.
Hideki Yasuda also said that while Panasonic gave financial backing to Tesla when it was smaller, the automaker’s expansion meant there was no need for capital ties, and the shares of Panasonic were up by 4.2 per cent on Friday.
A spokesperson from Panasonic said that the stale sale would not affect the partnership with Tesla but came as the automaker was diversifying its own battery supply chain.
Tesla had struck deals with China’s CATL, South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, and a unit of LG Chem.
Earlier this year, Panasonic said that it would buy the shares of US supply chain software company, Blue Yonder, that it already doesn’t own in a $7.1 billion deal. It would be biggest such deal in the decade.
