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Third Point, a Hedge Fund, Sets Its Activist Sights on Nestlé - The New York Times

posted onJune 26, 2017
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Article snippet: LONDON — Over the past two decades, the hedge fund mogul Daniel S. Loeb has established himself as one of the biggest activist investors around. Now, he has set his sights on one of Europe’s largest corporate citizens: Nestlé, the global food giant. In a letter to investors sent on Sunday, his Third Point hedge fund argued that Nestlé, a Swiss conglomerate whose wares range from candy to baby food to pet food, should sell its stake in L’Oréal and sell off nonessential operations as part of a broad shake-up. It is the latest ambitious move by an activist investor to rattle the leaders of the corporate world. Flush with cash, these funds have taken stakes in ever-bigger companies, hoping to goad them into selling themselves or breaking themselves up to improve their stock prices. Jana Partners, for instance, prodded change at Whole Foods Market. This month, that grocery store chain announced that it was selling itself to Amazon for $13.4 billion. And Trian Fund Management took a $3.5 billion stake in Procter & Gamble, a consumer products behemoth that has sought a way to improve stagnant sales. Third Point disclosed that it owned about 40 million shares in Nestlé, a stake that amounts to about $3.5 billion in stock. That would make the hedge fund the Swiss company’s sixth-largest shareholder, according to Standard & Poor’s Global Market Intelligence. Behind Third Point’s investment in Nestlé is a conviction that the company must do more to reshape its produ... Link to the full article to read more

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