Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Discloses 6.4% Stake in SouFun Holdings (SFUN)

Stephen Mandel’s Lone Pine Capital disclosed holding 3.7 million shares of SouFun Holdings Limited (NYSE:SFUN). The stake amounts to 6.4% of the company’s common stock. Previously, Lone Pine Capital held 45,000 shares under call options.

SouFun Holdings Limited (NYSE:SFUN) is a $6.6 billion, real estate Internet portal operator in China. Its stock has a trailing P/E of 23.x and a beta of 2.3. For the fourth quarter of 2013, the company recorded a 47.2% year-over-year increase in revenues to $217.2 million. Earnings per share jumped by 79.7% to $1.42.

For the current quarter, the consensus EPS estimate stands at $0.53. For the full year 2014, the company expects revenues between $780.0 million and $796.0 million, representing an annual increase of 22.5-25.0%.

One of the largest stockholders of SouFun Holdings is John Burbank’s Passport Capital, which held 2.2 million shares at the end of the fourth quarter of 2013. It is followed by Louis Navellier’s Navellier & Associates, with approximately 692,500 shares, and Chase Coleman and Feroz Dewan’s Tiger Global Management, which held 638,000 shares.

Lone Pine Capital was launched in 1997 and follows a “bottom-up” strategy. The fund is heavily invested in Services and Technology sectors. Stephen Mandel is from the Tiger club and before founding Lone Pine was with Robertson. He returned about 23% annually during the past 11 years, beating the S&P 500 index by more than 20 percentage points per year, on average.

Earlier, Lone Pine reported new positions in a number of companies, from financial services’ providers to sellers of hardwood flooring. Lone Pine acquired 6.52 million shares in LPL Financial Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:LPLA). The fund also disclosed adding  Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc (NYSE:LL) and  SBA Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:SBAC) to its equity portfolio, holding stakes of  7.9%, and 6.4 %, respectively.

According to the fund’s latest 13F, Lone Pine Capital is the largest shareholder in Dollar General Corp (NYSE:DG), with a stake valued in excess of $1.1 billion. It is followed by Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp (NASDAQ:CTSH), of which it holds 10.7 million shares valued at $1.1 billion, and Priceline.com Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN), in which it owns 884,800 shares worth more than $1.0 billion.

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