(Bloomberg) -- Tencent Holdings Ltd. is the seller behind a share sale of Chinese brokerage-platform operator Futu Holdings Ltd., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest that takes advantage of improving market conditions after Beijing unveiled economic stimulus.
An unidentified shareholder raised about $206 million after selling Futu’s American depositary shares at a 5.9% premium to last close, according to terms seen by Bloomberg News on Thursday. It’s rare to see investors offload stocks at premiums in block trades.
Tencent has been unwinding some of its investment portfolio and the Futu share sale is in line with the strategy, one of the people said, asking not to be identified as the information is private. Representatives for Tencent and Futu didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment outside of business hours in China.
Shares of Futu jumped 7.7% as of 10:18 a.m. in New York on Thursday, extending their four-day rally to more than 20%.
Shareholders in some Chinese companies have cashed out more than $1 billion from their holdings in the past week. Internet investing firm Prosus NV has sold its entire stake in online travel agency Trip.com in a $743 million block trade, Bloomberg News has reported. Chinese search engine Baidu Inc. later sold $534 million in the company’s American depositary shares.
The share sales come as the Chinese government is rolling out more measures to help the economy. The country is considering injecting up to 1 trillion yuan ($142 billion) of capital into its biggest state banks to increase their capacity to support the struggling economy, Bloomberg News reported Thursday. The central bank’s governor this week cut a key short-term interest rate and announced plans to reduce the amount of money banks must hold in reserve to the lowest level since at least 2018.
--With assistance from Pei Li.
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