LeapRate Exclusive… Payments services and technologies provider SafeCharge International Group Ltd (LON:SCH) has indicated in regulatory filings that global bank JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) has reduced its stake in the company to 3.69%.
JPMorgan had taken a 7.43% stake in SafeCharge late last year.
It looks like JPMorgan will take a loss on the shares it sold. Assuming that it acquired the SafeCharge shares at around the time it first reported the position in early December, JPMorgan paid around £2.50 per share. SafeCharge is now trading at around £2.00 after a steady decline in the company’s shares late April. So it looks like JPMorgan booked a £2.8 million (USD $3.7 million) loss on the shares it sold, and is sitting on a similar paper loss on the SafeCharge shares it still holds.
(For those keeping score, JPMorgan sold about 5.66 million of the 11.26 million SafeCharge it had held, retaining 5.60 million. JPMorgan’s remaining 3.69% stake in SafeCharge is worth about £11.2 million, or USD $14.9 million).
There doesn’t seem to be an easy explanation for SafeCharge’s two month share price drop (see graph below). The company indicated recently that it will report record EBITDA for the first half of 2016. However SafeCharge did seem to hint that EBITDA didn’t grow by that much. Perhaps investors are sensing that things are stable at SafeCharge, but that the company isn’t growing much at this point.
SafeCharge one year share price graph. Source: CNBC.
JPMorgan holds its SafeCharge shares via subsidiaries JPMorgan Asset Management Holdings (UK) Limited and JPMorgan Securities plc.