Travelport Faces Dramatic Changes if Activist Investor Gets His Way
Photo Credit: Paul Singer is the force behind Elliott Management, a U.S. activist hedge fund that has taken a stake in Travelport and believes that private equity firms might take the travel technology company private. He spoke about another matter on CNBC in a recent interview. CNBC
Skift Take
The last thing travel tech giant Travelport needs is to be sold to private equity. It's still digging out from all the debt Blackstone saddled it with. Our best guess is that it will be forced to partly sell eNett, a payments business.
Shares of Travelport surged after U.S. hedge fund Elliott Management revealed it had bought 11.8 percent, or about 14.7 million shares.
After the news on Monday, traders ran up the company's share price to the highest levels since the months after the company went public in 2014.
Travelport closed Wednesday with a market capitalization of $2 billion, making it fair game for a bid to be taken private by Elliott, estimated to have almost $35 billion of assets under management.
Travelport is one of the three biggest travel distribution technology companies, along with larger rivals Amadeus and Sabre.
Elliott is run by Paul Singer, whom the Financial Times named last month as one of the world's half-dozen most famous activist investors.
Over more than a decade, Singer has nearly always wrought changes in the companies he has bought into.
A spokesperson for Elliott Management declined to comment.
A Skift Research analysis finds that Elliott has bought stocks with actu
