On Tuesday, CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. announced that it will sell a majority stake in the company it controls that operates ports on both ends of the Panama Canal to American investors. According to Bloomberg, a consortium including BlackRock Inc., Global Infrastructure Partners, and Terminal Investment Ltd. have come to an agreement with the Hong Kong-based conglomerate to acquire units within it that would grant them 80% ownership of the Hutchison Ports group, which operates 43 ports in 23 countries, and 90% Panama Ports Co., another Hutchison-owned entity that controls ports in Balboa and Cristobal. Bloomberg reports that the CK Hutchison will receive around $19 billion in cash for the deal.
The Panamanian government had entered an agreement with the Hutchison-owned Panama Ports Co. to administer the ports for 25 years in 1997, and was renewed in 2021 by the Panama Maritime Authority. The sale announced today comes after President Donald Trump pressured Panama over management of the canal. “China is operating the Panama Canal,” he declared in his inaugural address on January 20th. “And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.” That same day, the Panamanian government announced that it was conducting an audit of the deal with Hutchison. On Tuesday March 4th, the same day that Hutchison announced the sale to BlackRock, Panama’s Attorney General Luis Carlos Gómez called on the country’s Supreme Court to declare the deal with Panama Ports Co. unconstitutional.
BlackRock, the largest firm of its kind in the world with over $10 trillion worth of assets under management, is CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd.’s biggest single investor, reporting a 5.17% stake in the company worth some $7.6 billion as of February 16th. The American firm also acquired Global Infrastructure Partners in 2024, which has a 35% stake in Terminal Investment Ltd. as of 2013. The Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison was founded in 1950 by Li Ka-shing, who ran the company until 2018, growing it from a small business selling plastic flowers to a conglomerate spanning real estate, infrastructure, finance, and telecommunications. Now 95, Li had some $2.5 billion invested in the company as of 2023.
