Skift Take
Tripadvisor and Trip.com Group maintain that their strategic partnership is as strong as ever even though the Chinese company just sold 20 percent of the shares it owns in Tripadvisor and is likely to sell a lot more this year. Rhetoric aside, you can't spin away that fact.
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Trip.com Group, which has a joint venture with U.S.-based Tripadvisor in China, started selling a substantial portion of its stake in Tripadvisor.
In a financial filing last week, Trip.com Group disclosed it sold 1.38 million shares of Tripadvisor common stock starting in mid-May, reducing its stake in Tripadvisor to 4.5 percent.
At its height in July 2017, Trip.com Group wielded a 5.7 percent stake in Tripadvisor through ownership of 6.95 million shares. This means Trip.com Group sold around 20 percent of the shares it owned in Tripadvisor.
The two companies announced Tuesday that Trip.com was granted approval under their governance agreement to off-load "a portion of