BlackRock has emerged as one of the top investors in New York-listed cruise behemoth Carnival Corp, according to a regulatory filing.
The New York-based investment management giant holds a 5.1% stake in the Arnold Donald-led company that is backed by 50m shares, documents filed on Friday with the US Securities & Exchange Commission have revealed.
Carnival’s shares, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CCL, slipped 2.5% on Friday to close at $17.21.
This share price put the value of the position held by BlackRock — Carnival’s third-largest investor — at $861m at the end of the day’s regular trading in New York.
Of the 50m of shares that BlackRock said it owned as of 31 December, only 43.4m of them count toward its voting power in Carnival, which has a market capitalisation of $24.7bn backed by 986m outstanding shares.
Carnival’s stock movement ranged from $17.18 per share to $18 per share on Friday. It attained a 52-week low of $14.94 per share versus a 52-week high of $31.52 per share.
The world’s largest cruise provider’s top investor is Vanguard Group, whose 87m shares give it an 8.8% stake worth $1.5bn as of Friday’s close, according to Yahoo Finance.
Public Investment Fund is the second-largest stakeholder in Carnival with 50.8m units representing a 5.2% stake worth $875m.
Carnival’s share price went as high as $71.81 per share on 1 January 2018 before cooling off to $50.83 per share on 1 December 2019.
They plummeted to $13.17 on 1 March 2020 and have reached only $29.56 per share on 1 May 2021 since then as a result of the pandemic.
