Marsh & McLennan said it plans to re-purchase $800 million shares of its common stock, which led to a 2 percent uptick in its share price in early morning trading today.
The New York-based services company, the parent company of insurance broker Marsh and reinsurance broker Guy Carpenter, announced after the close of trading Friday that it would make the repurchase from a single financial institution. The company did not name the institution and an MMC spokeswoman said it will not.
The $800 million comes from MMC's recent sale of its investment unit, Putnam, which was sold to Canada-based Great-West Lifeco for $3.9 billion, of which MMC said it netted $2.5 billion.
MMC said its board of directors approved a $1.5 billion repurchase plan earlier this month.
Repurchasing of shares is often done by corporations to increase the value of their stock. MMC's shares shot up in early morning trading Monday by about 2 percent from a close of $26.51 on Friday to $27.05 a share. By noon, shares were trading at $26.75. The stock closed on the day up 27 cents to $26.78 a share.
MMC said as of July 31 there were 541 million shares of common stock outstanding. The total number of shares to be repurchased would be based on the average price during a period of time to be negotiated by the parties.
(This story was updated at 4:42 p.m.)
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.