SHARES of Tencent Holdings Ltd. edged lower in Hong Kong on Thursday after Prosus NV priced its placement of the Shenzhen-based Internet giant’s stock at the top end of a marketed range, raising HK$114.2 billion (US$14.7 billion) in the world’s second-biggest block trade on record.

Amsterdam-listed Prosus priced the deal at HK$595 per share, which represents a 5.5 percent discount to Tencent’s last close of HK$629.50, according to terms of the deal. The selldown is the second-biggest block trade, smaller only than the U.S. Treasury Department’s US$20.7 billion sale of American International Group Inc. shares in 2012.

E-commerce group Prosus’ sale of a 2 percent stake in Tencent will reduce its holding to just under 29 percent while remaining the biggest shareholder of the Chinese firm, it said in a statement earlier Wednesday. It was marketing 191.89 million Tencent shares at HK$575 to HK$595 apiece.

“The sale could provide a very good opportunity for long-term investors to buy Tencent,” said Louis Tse, Hong Kong-based managing director at VC Asset Management Ltd. “The antitrust law in China, whether it would be very stringent, is a key to its future performance. But being able to price the shares at the high end reflects market confidence.”

Naspers Ltd., Prosus’ parent, invested just US$32 million in Tencent in 2001, when it was an obscure Internet firm. The shares are now worth about US$239 billion.

Prosus has committed not to sell any further Tencent shares for at least the next three years, the company said. Naspers sold US$9.8 billion worth of Tencent stake in 2018, a year before spinning off the shareholding and most of its other businesses into what is now Prosus.

“The market has already expected that every three years Naspers would want to trim down its holdings to take out the heavy gains from Tencent to invest somewhere else,” said Tse. “So this placement itself is not very surprising.”(SD-Agencies)