Scottish investment firm Baillie Gifford & Co. is betting big on Spotify.
According to MBW’s calculations, the company became SPOT’s biggest non-insider shareholder last year.
Baillie Gifford & Co’s owned 9.7% of Spotify’s common stock at the close of 2018, according to an SEC filing posted yesterday and dated December 31.
The filing indicates that Baillie Gifford & Co finished the year with 17,565,904 ordinary Spotify shares which, at Spotify’s current share price ($133.98), were cumulatively worth approximately $2.35bn.
At least 4.7% of Baillie Gifford’s 9.7% stake must have been acquired after Spotify floated on the New York Stock exchange in April last year: the investment company wasn’t named amongst the list of Spotify shareholders with more than 5% of common stock revealed in an SEC update on April 3 last year (see below).
Baillie Gifford has also invested its managed funds in the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, Alibaba and Netflix.
Its stake in Spotify began as a relatively early investment in Daniel Ek‘s company: Baillie Gifford was one of 15 investors that contributed to a Series G funding round which pumped $526m into Spotify in June 2015.
Spotify is currently reportedly preparing to launch in India, having secured a deal with the country’s largest home-grown label, T-Series.Music Business Worldwide
