Toyota Has Now Unloaded All Of Its Tesla Stock
Toyota has effectively sold off all of its shares in Tesla — with the company having finished doing so by the end of 2016, apparently. That news comes to us from a recent announcement from a company spokesperson.
As we have reported numerous times before, Tesla and Toyota had previously been in something of a cooperative development process (a while back), which resulted in the development of the electric RAV4 compliance model sold in California. That followed Toyota’s acquisition of a 3% stake in Tesla half a decade or so ago.
That 3% stake in Tesla [TSLA] had been acquired by Toyota for ~$50 million, so the firm no doubt made a nice tidy profit with the recent sale of its remaining stock in the company.
With regard to the recent comments from the Toyota spokesperson, they included this: “Our development partnership with Tesla ended a while ago, and since there has not been any new developments on that front, we decided it was time to sell the remaining stake.”
Reuters provides more: “Toyota spokesman Ryo Sakai said the company had sold all of its shares in Tesla as of the end of 2016, part of a regular, periodic review of its investments, after it had initially sold down a portion in 2014. … In November, the Japanese automaker appointed its president to lead their newly-formed electric car division, flagging its commitment to develop a technology that it has been slow to embrace. The department comprises a new in-house unit to plan Toyota’s strategy to develop and market electric cars as part of the company’s efforts to keep pace with tightening global emissions regulations.”
As we reported recently, though, Toyota president Akio Toyoda still sounds somewhat ambivalent about electric vehicles. Nonetheless, the company’s EV plans still seem to be on track.
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