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Danish tycoon lost 1.5 billion kroner in one day
Pia Marsh
June 17th, 2015
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This article is more than 9 years old.
Medical device company Coloplast experienced a massive downturn in the Danish stock market yesterday
Coloplast forced to lower its expectations for next year’s accounts due to yesterday’s loss (photo: Flickr/edkohler)
Yesterday proved to be an expensive day for the medical company Coloplast, after the company recorded huge losses and its biggest decline in seven years.
And bad news for Coloplast means bad news for the company’s major shareholder Niels Peter Louis-Hansen, with the value of his shares falling a staggering 1.6 billion kroner in the space of one day.
According to the latest annual accounts, Louis-Hansen owns almost 21 percent of the shares in the company, which is known for producing ostomy bags and catheters.
Statistics reveal that share prices fell 7.9 percent at to 446.3 kroner. Thus, the market value dropped from 97.8 billion dollars to 90 billion in just one day.
International problems
According to Sydbank analyst Soren Løntoft Hansen, the downturn is due to a number of problems in the UK and the US.
The UK market faces challenges with one its initiatives, a ‘home care’ service, and the US has been slow with its marketing and promotional activity due to a dispute with the US Department of Justice.
Stocks continued to decline today, and at present it has fallen by a further three percent, which, according Løntoft Hansen, was not a surprise.
“The price drop was not surprising. Coloplast has been spared a lot of challenges, and there have been high expectations for share prices. But the events of yesterday and the relative downgrade has undeniably hits stocks very hard,” he told Ekstra Bladet.
“The downturn both yesterday and today reflects the high expectations that there have been for Coloplast,” he continued.
However, experts assert that the downturn in the stock market must also be considered alongside the significant increase in shares in the past few years, where investors, including Louis-Hansen, have earned billions of dollars in the upturn.
Bad year for Louis-Hansen
It has been a somewhat turbulent year for Louis-Hansen. Back in March, he was subjected to a home robbery in his mansion in Vedbaek, where a man entered and threatened him and his wife to transfer 2.5 million kroner to a specified bank account.
Fortunately, the police were easily able to track the account and a 35-year-old Faroese man was arrested for home robbery.
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