Oh, one more thing. In late March, Tencent (HKSE:00700), the largest publicly owned company in China, announced that it had acquired 5% of Tesla’s shares for $1.8 billion. Tencent is capitalized at $272 billion and is one of the fastest growing businesses in China. Tencent had purchased Tesla shares over the past two years in open market transactions and through Tesla secondary public equity offerings. Tencent’s average purchase price was $217 per share. Although Tencent’s investment in Tesla is “passive” at present, Tesla currently does about 15% of its business in China and it could be a lot easier to penetrate that very large market if Tesla had help from such a partner. We will see.
From Ron Baron (Trades, Portfolio)'s first quarter 2017 Baron Partners Fund commentary.
