It’s Time We Talked About Our Owners

How vast asset managers impact ‘our increasingly cartelized economy.’
The world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, was splashed across the front pages of the Spanish financial news yesterday. The firm had just raised raised its stake in Spain’s telecoms giant Telefnica to 336 million shares – the equivalent of 6.7% of Telefnica’s total capital, with a market value of just under 3 billion.
In the short space of five months BlackRock has almost doubled its holdings and is now the largest owner of Telefnica stock, ahead of Spain’s second biggest bank, BBVA, which holds 6% of the shares. The asset manager has also expanded its participation in Telefnica’s international subsidiaries, raising its holdings in Telefnica Deutschland to 0.76% and Telefnica Brasil to almost 2%, making it the firm’s biggest institutional shareholder.
BlackRock is the largest institutional shareholder of Telefnica’s two main market rivals in Spain, holding 7.3% of Vodafone and 1.96% of part state-owned Orange. It’s also the second largest investor in British Telecom, after Deutsche Telekom, with a 7.84% stake. In the U. S. market BlackRock has the third largest position in Verizon, with 6.17% of the capital, and the second largest position in AT&T, with 5.84%.

This post was published at Wolf Street on Feb 2, 2017.