Five big institutional investors, including Singapore’s GIC and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, will invest £3.1 billion ($4.7 billion) for a 33% stake in the U.K. mobile phone interests of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa Ltd.
In separate announcements, GIC, a sovereign wealth fund with an investment portfolio estimated at more than $300 billion, and CPPIB, a Toronto-based pension fund with C$239 billion ($197 billion), said they will invest £1.1 billion each in Hutchison’s U.K. mobile phone operator Three UK, after that company’s acquisition of rival 02 UK makes it the country’s larger mobile operator with nearly 33 million customers.
An announcement by Hutchison Whampoa, the holding company of billionaire Li Ka-shing, listed the C$225.9 billion Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec, Montreal, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority subsidiary Limpart Holdings and Sao Paulo-based investment banking and money management firm BTG Pactual as the remaining investors. Details on the scale of their separate investments weren’t immediately available.
A spokesman for ADIA said an announcement on the deal would come out Sunday. Spokesmen at Caisse and BTG Pactual couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
In the CPPIB news release, Mark Jenkins, senior managing director and global head of private investments, said, “We expect this investment will generate attractive long-term risk-adjusted returns, which is appealing for an investor like CPPIB.”
The news release said the CPPIB investment should close in 2016.
