Toyota Sells Entire Stake in Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)

Tesla

Toyota Motor Corp (ADR) (NYSE:TM) sold its entire stake in Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), the automaker announced on Saturday.

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Toyota said that it unloaded all of TSLA shares at the end of 2016, ending a more than six-year-old partnership, Bloomberg reported.

The Japanese automaker acquired a $50 million stake in Tesla in 2010. At the time, the company also sold a closed factory in California to Tesla for $42 million to help the automaker introduce less-polluting vehicles in the United States.

Ryo Sakai, a Toyota spokesman Ryo Sakai, said that the automaker sold all of Tesla shares as of the end of 2016 as part of a regular, periodic review of its investments.

“Our development partnership with Tesla ended a while ago, and since there has not been any new developments on that front, we decided it was time to sell the remaining stake,” Sakai was quoted as saying by Reuters.

The spokesman did not disclose the size of its stake and declined to provide further details about the transaction.

Like other big automakers, Toyota is also working to build electric cars. The company set up a dedicated division in November 2016 for the designing and development of electric cars.

Shares of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) are up nearly 60% so far this year. During the last 12 months, the automaker’s share price has surged more than 55%. Tesla has a market cap of $55.74 billion.

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