Foreign portfolio investor Societe Generale picked up 1.29 crore shares in Hindustan Unilever (HUL) on Thursday. The purchase was made via bulk deals from British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline Pte.

The company sold 5.69 percent stake in HUL, which they got via an amalgamation deal in April, for about ₹25,400 crore. The GSK share-sale marks the largest secondary trade on Indian stock exchanges. The share price of HUL has suffered an intra-day crash of 7 per cent on the back of the deal.

The HUL bulk deal happened at around ₹1,900 per share. More than 13.37 crore worth of shares were sold by Glaxo and Horlicks. In this, nearly 10 per cent of the shares, part of the bulk deal, were picked up by Societe Generale. The rest of the buyers are unknown yet. Morgan Stanley, HSBC, JPMorgan were the advisors to the deal.

HUL completed the merger of GSK Consumer Healthcare with itself, and acquired Horlicks brand for India from GSK for ₹3,045 crore. It had issued new shares to these companies for the merger. As per the scheme of amalgamation amongst GSK Consumer Healthcare and HUL, the two British companies GlaxoSmithKline Pte and Horlicks had received 5.4 crore shares of HUL, which was 2.3 per cent and 3.39 per cent stake respectively in April.

Stake of HUL’s parent company Unilever Plc and group companies in HUL has reduced to 61.9 percent from 67.19 percent earlier after the issue of new shares.

The merger of GSK Consumer with HUL took place on the basis of an exchange ratio of 4.39 HUL shares for one GSK Consumer share.

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