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Terence Lee · · 2 min read

Value of Morgan Stanley’s shares in Flipkart, Twitter, Yelp drop over 25% in a quarter

decline sign

Image credit: Wikimedia

Things are not looking good for the tech industry. Global financial firm Morgan Stanley’s Institutional Fund Trust has just reported in a quarterly SEC filing on Friday that it has marked down the value of its shares in a number of prominent tech companies.

Among well known names that are seeing the most drastic quarter-to-quarter decline are Twitter, Yelp, Flipkart, and Dropbox, which saw Morgan Stanley write down their prices-per-share by between 23 and 36 percent in one quarter. More details on Morgan Stanley’s tech holdings below (all values in US$):

morgan-stanley-shares-in-tech

Some tech companies gained in value, but they’re the minority. Social network for professionals LinkedIn saw its share value rise by 9 percent. The biggest gainer is Zalando, a Rocket Internet ecommerce site based in Germany.

All in all, this Morgan Stanley fund appears to have decreased its exposure in tech companies. The number of shares it owns in Tesla Motors, for example, has dropped from 1 million to less than 700,000.

In that quarter, it appeared to have gotten rid of its stakes in Chinese video streaming site Youku, game developer Zynga, and daily deals company Groupon. Meanwhile, it now has shares in enterprise software firm Atlassian worth US$17.5 million.

While the value of some tech companies didn’t appear to decline much, the picture is starker once you zoom out.

Tech news site The Information reports that Morgan Stanley marked down its share value in security big data company Palantir by 32 percent against its previous funding round, while Airbnb’s went down by 10 percent against its previous investment round.

The decline in book value among mature tech companies appears to be part of a larger weakening of the economy that has affected early-stage tech companies and non-tech industries.

The media has been reporting about layoffs within internet companies, with Rakuten, Foodpanda, and Zenefits just some of them.

The market is expected to continue its cool down in the months ahead.

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TIA Writer

Terence Lee

I like analyzing and digging into the real goings-on in the tech industry. Holds these crypto: BTC, Eth, Matic