Just Food

Nelson Peltz’s Trian Partners sells £180m worth of Unilever shares

Activist investor Peltz got a Unilever board seat last year after building up a 1.5% stake in the Ben & Jerry’s owner.

Trian Partners, the New York hedge fund led by activist investor Nelson Peltz, has sold around £180m ($231.3m) worth of Unilever shares since last week.

The sales by Trian Fund Management, offloaded in three batches starting from last Friday (9 August), were for “portfolio management purposes”, according to an RNS filing yesterday from the London-headquartered FMCG giant.

Trian started building a stake in Unilever in 2022 before the Marmite brand owner’s bid for GlaxoSmithKline’s consumer health business under then CEO Alan Jope. The proposed deal had drawn the ire of some investors, in part over its potential cost, and was later abandoned.

Billionaire businessman Peltz, one of the founding partners of Trian Fund Management and its CEO, was then appointed as a member of Unilever’s board as a non-executive director in the summer of 2022.

At the time, the Hellmann’s mayonnaise maker confirmed Trian Partners had acquired a 1.5% stake in the business, amounting to more than 37 million shares, and that Peltz would also sit on Unilever’s compensation committee.

Now under the leadership of former FrieslandCampina executive Hein Schumacher, Unilever confirmed in the filing that almost four million shares have been sold in the past week by Trian Fund Management.

The largest batch was last Friday - around 2.93m shares amounting to around £138.9m - followed by further but much smaller disposals on Monday and Tuesday of this week, the RNS filings show.

Since Schumacher became CEO last July, he has put Unilever’s ice-cream division up for review, with a potential spin-off or sale of that business slated to be concluded by the end of 2025.

Last month, the Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum brands owner declined to comment on a report that Unilever had started initial talks with a group of investors over the potential sale of ice cream and that it was conducting presentations with possible suitors.

Just Food has asked Trian Partners to confirm its reasons for the Unilever share disposals and to confirm the current shareholding stake.

Of the approximately 3.8m shares sold by Trian Partners since last week, around 738, 472 shares were sold on Monday for circa £34.8m, and a further 155,000 on Tuesday for about £7.3m.