Danish shipping and oil group AP Moller-Maersk will hand shareholders a $6.6bn windfall in dividends this year after it sells its 20% stake in Denmark’s biggest bank Danske.
Maersk - the world’s largest container shipping company - said it would sell 15% to its controlling shareholder, the Moller family foundation, saying the deal ensured Danske remained in Danish hands and had a long-term major investor.
It will offer the remaining 5% to other existing Maersk shareholders, it added.
Maersk published 2014 results broadly in line with analyst expectations from a Reuters poll. Net revenue was largely flat at $47.57bn and net profit was up 37% to $5.2bn - boosted by the sale of its stake in Danske Supermarked Group.
It booked $2.2bn, or $1.9bn after tax, in impairment losses at its oil unit. Most of that was a $1.7bn write-down announced last year on the value of its Brazilian assets, the rest involved the value of its British assets after oil prices slumped in the second half of 2014.
It expects group underlying profit to fall to “slightly below” $4bn this year from $4.1bn in 2014.
But it expects underlying profit at its container shipping unit Maersk Line to be above the $2.2bn in 2014. The business, often seen as a bellwether for global trade, has been struggling with low freight rates along with its peers.
The conglomerate did not specify how much the foundation was paying for the 15% Danske stake, but said it would correspond to $5.5bn.
That $5.5bn will go to shareholders at about 1,569 crowns a share, Maersk said, and it also proposed dividends of $1.1bn for the 2014 business year, or 300 a share.
Maersk’s shares jumped by more than 8% to top 15,000 crowns, close to a record high of 15,070 crowns hit last September after Maersk announced its first share buyback programme and analysts upgraded their price targets.
In recent years, Maersk has sold off assets such as stakes in supermarkets and Danish shipping company DFDS as well as fleets of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and crude oil tankers and oil production vessels.
The Danske stake sell is immensely positive and will help reduce a discount on Maersk shares that exists because the company is a conglomerate, said Jesper Langmack, head of equity investments at PFA, a pension fund that is the largest Maersk shareholder aside from the foundation that controls it.
