Bond Market News

SoftBank has sold its stake in Cruise, a self-driving car subsidiary of American auto major General Motors (GM). Since 2018 SoftBank had invested $1.2bn in Cruise, and GM would now pay $2.1bn to buy SoftBank Vision Fund’s stake and infuse another $1.35bn in the company. Post-transaction GM will hold 80% in Cruise with other prominent investors in the company being Honda Motors, Microsoft, and Walmart. Cruise launched its services in San Fransico and is awaiting a regulatory permit be allowed to charge riders. Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University said that going by the the experience of Alphabet’s Waymo, revenue generation will currently be very small from these projects. GM CEO Mary Barra stated, “GM is leveraging the strength of its balance sheet to capitalize on the opportunity to increase its equity investment in Cruise and advance our integrated autonomous vehicle strategy”.

General Motor’s dollar bonds were trading slightly higher, with its 4.15% 2023s up over 0.24 points to 101.91, yielding 2.46%.

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