After increasing its stake in Mallinckrodt PLC (NYSE:MNK) by 54% during the second quarter, a recently submitted 13G shows that billionaire Andreas Halvorsen‘s Viking Global has purchased an additional 311,530 shares of the company. With this purchase, Viking Global’s stake in the company now stands at slightly over 5.72 million shares or 4.87% of the outstanding shares of the company. Even though Viking Global has upped its stake, due to the recent slump in Mallinckrodt PLC (NYSE:MNK)’s stock, the current value of its position in the company stands at $494.14 million, far less than the $637.53 million that it was worth at the end of June.
Andreas Halvorsen founded Viking Global, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based long/short equity hedge fund in 1999, along with Brian Olson (who left the fund in 2005) and David Ott (who left the fund in 2010). Before starting Viking Global, the trio of Halvorsen, Olson, and Ott used to work for hedge fund legend Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management. Due to the 13.4% percent return Viking had in 2014 and the almost 18% annual returns the fund has generated for its investors since its inception, Andreas Halvorsen has emerged as one of the most successful proteges, or ‘Tiger Cubs’ of Robertson. In March of this year, the fund announced that its longtime executive and CIO, Tom Purcell, who has been with Viking since 1999, will be leaving the fund. According to the latest figures, Viking currently boasts assets under management in excess of $32 billion and its U.S public equity portfolio at the end of June stood at $26.47 billion.
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Mallinckrodt PLC (NYSE:MNK) is an Ireland-based multibillion-dollar specialty biopharmaceutical company. It came into existence in 2013 when its erstwhile owner Covidien plc (NYSE:COV) decided to spin off its pharmaceutical business into a separate publicly-traded company. Shares of Mallinckrodt PLC (NYSE:MNK) witnessed a glorious uptrend after its debut on the market and until just recently, were trading at more than three times the price they made their debut on the NYSE at. However, due to the dismal fiscal 2015 third quarter numbers reported by the company recently, its shares have fallen by more than 30% since then. Apart from Viking Global, Mallinckrodt PLC (NYSE:MNK) counted John Paulson‘s Paulson & Co and Neal C. Bradsher‘s Broadwood Capital among its largest shareholders during the second quarter. At the end of June, Paulson & Co owned almost 6.6 million shares and Broadwood Capital owned over 1.6 million shares of the company.
