Nippon Steel Sells All POSCO Holdings Shares... "Partnership Continues"

POSCO Holdings Sells 3.42% Stake
Worth Approximately 1.1 Trillion Won Based on Closing Price on the 23rd

Nippon Steel announced on the 24th that it will sell all of its shares in South Korea's POSCO Holdings.

In a press release posted on its website that day, Nippon Steel stated, "We have decided to sell our 3.42% stake (2,894,712 shares) in POSCO Holdings, which we acquired and held under strategic alliance agreements, to improve capital efficiency through asset compression." This amounts to approximately 1.1 trillion KRW based on the closing price on the 23rd.

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Nippon Steel added that the timing of the sale will be decided after monitoring market trends, and even if it sells its POSCO Holdings shares, it will continue to pursue results through ongoing partnerships with POSCO in the future.

Previously, Nippon Steel signed a strategic alliance agreement with POSCO Holdings in August 2000 and deepened the strategic alliance with an agreement on mutual additional stock acquisitions in October 2006, strengthening their cooperative relationship.

Meanwhile, Kyodo News reported that Nippon Steel has reapplied to U.S. authorities for approval to acquire US Steel, a symbol of American industrialization. This application has postponed the review of the US Steel acquisition by the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) until after the U.S. presidential election in November. It is interpreted that the U.S. government considered it burdensome to decide on the sale of a domestic company to a foreign entity before the election. Previously, Nippon Steel had been pursuing a plan to acquire US Steel for $14.1 billion (approximately 18.3 trillion KRW) since December last year.