Acquisitions and Insider Share Trading are High at Autodesk.
As Autodesk are named one of Fortune 100’s best companies to work for, so why is the CEO and 7 other employees selling so many shares? With the Shareholder’s of Delcam approving the Autodesk acquisition, there’s a lot of money being exchanged, so let’s take a look at the activity in the last year.
Acquisitions
Here’s the list of Autodesk’s 9 acquisitions since January, 2013. As you can see they’ve been busy with the chequebook.
New Product Releases
In the last 12 months they have released 13 new products:
Share Prices
While this was all happening, they were posting healthy profits as their shares rose to $51 after hitting lows around July of $32. It’s currently sitting around $53.
Insider Selling
The most insider selling has happened in the last 30 days. There’s been almost a million shares sold by employees of Autodesk, with the biggest selling coming from CEO, Carl Bass selling around $33 million between January 2-6th. In the last year, there have been over 2.2 million shares sold and zero purchased by insiders.
| Name | Title | Trade Date | Shares Sold | Rule 10b5-1 | Current Ownership | Decrease In Ownership |
| Carl Bass | CEO | Jan 2-6 | 817,500 | Yes | 372,808 shares + 94,111 options | 63.6% |
| Lorrie Norrington | Director | Jan 2 | 6,734 | No | 17,200 shares | 28.1% |
| Steven Blum | SVP | Dec 31 | 45,000 | Yes | 90,517 shares + 15,000 options | 29.9% |
| Kris Halvorsen | Director | Dec 17-24 | 30,000 | No | 22,562 shares + 10,000 options | 48.0% |
| Pascal Di Fronzo | SVP | Dec 24 | 45,000 | No | 34,385 shares + 33,239 options | 40.0% |
| Mark Hawkins | CFO | Dec 20 | 13,750 | Yes | 62,136 shares + 11,468 options | 15.7% |
| Steven West | Director | Dec 19 | 20,000 | No | 24,905 shares | 44.5% |
| Crawford Beveridge | Director | Dec 16 | 7,000 | Yes | 37,473 shares + 10,000 options | 12.9% |
Source: Seeking Alpha
With no inside buying happening either, what does one make of this activity? I’m no financial expert, nor a financial anything when it comes to the stock market, to me it looks like buying companies would raise the stock prices and with Santa Clause usually coming to Wall Street after Christmas and staying until the first couple days of January, it may have been a good time to sell and maybe one of the reasons it’s a great place to work.
