Royal Mail bet delivers for Daniel Kretinsky

[postareale]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/roya ... -jpg3tgk89

Royal Mail bet delivers for Daniel Kretinsky

A Czech billionaire has made more than £500 million on paper by taking on short-sellers and betting on Royal Mail and J Sainsbury.

Daniel Kretinsky, known as the Czech Sphinx for his inscrutable nature, started building a stake in Royal Mail last spring after its shares tanked during the markets’ coronavirus slump.

At the time short-sellers including BlackRock, the world’s biggest money manager, and GLG Partners, the hedge fund, were betting that the stock would continue to fall. Yet Royal Mail emerged as a winner of the pandemic amid an online shopping boom.

Through his Vesa Equity Investment vehicle, Kretinsky, 45, who is worth £3 billion according to Forbes, first bought Royal Mail shares last March when they were about 154p and he has since topped up his holdings to amass a 15.01 per cent stake, making Vesa the company’s biggest shareholder.

Analysis suggests that Kretinsky spent just shy of £300 million buying Royal Mail stock. With the share price passing 500p to its highest in almost three years, his stake is worth about £768 million, netting him an estimated profit of £472 million.

Last spring, according to IHS Markit, 6 per cent of Royal Mail shares were out on loan to funds betting against the company. They try to make money by borrowing shares from brokers, selling them in the market and then buying them back later, hopefully for less than they sold for, and pocketing the difference. The number of shares on loan peaked in July at above 10 per cent, but IHS Markit data shows that now only 0.8 per cent of its shares are on loan.

In September Vesa took a 3.05 per cent stake in Sainsbury’s. It is the fifth most-shorted stock in London, according to IHS Markit, because of doubts over its ability to rebuild its profits after a couple of hard years. This week Kretinsky bought another near-7 per cent stake from the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, taking his total holding to 9.99 per cent. That stake is worth about £545 million, meaning that he is £39 million or so in profit on his Sainsbury’s venture, according to estimates.

[rambo1]

Will he now be cashing out his rmg profits? That's the question.

[rambo1]

Think he bought some more actually. Good sign.

[Celgar]

People are still ordering their stuff, whether it be clothes, plants, toilet rolls, or even water, via the internet rather than going to the shops. With the Indian variant spreading and Boris leaving it to the general public to be 'careful' rather than actually doing something we are now on our way to the next full lockdown by about September at the latest. So RM shares are just going to keep going up and up. Wish now I hadn't ditch them at £3.77 but I couldn't trust the RM bosses to not collapse the share price. They had a little go at doing it but are now having to admit the profits are rolling in. They are still going to try and cut our budgets based on the state the business was in pre-Covid.