Peugeot Invest: A 20x SpaceX Buried Inside a Stellantis Wreck
NAV fell 12.5% as the legacy auto stake halved — yet the private book returned 8.5% and management still refuses to buy back stock at a 60% discount.
PEUG.PA · Earnings Call · 2026-09-24
The quarter in one sentence
Peugeot Invest's half-year was a tale of two portfolios pulling in opposite directions, and the ugly one is the one that shows up in the net asset value. NAV per share ended June 30 at EUR 144.8, down 12.5% over the period. The cause is not the private book — that delivered an 8.5% net return at constant exchange rates, translating into value creation of just under EUR 240 million excluding FX. The cause is a single name: the Stellantis share price collapsed 48% in six months, dragging the holding's most famous asset from the majority of its worth to just 20% of gross assets. It is worth pausing on how violently the mix has shifted. For years Peugeot Invest was Stellantis with a private-equity hobby. Now Coquard frames it as a diversification milestone: "Stellantis now accounts for only 20% of our GAV, significantly reducing its weight in our portfolio." The portfolio itself — 79% of gross asset value — did its job. Direct holdings were broadly flat, with a Robertet share-price decline offset by private-holding uplifts; the stronger engine was the fund book, up sharply on the strength of one manager.The position nobody asks about — until they do
Buried three quarters down the transcript is the most interesting number of the call. Peugeot committed to three Valor Equity funds between 2017 and 2021; those funds invested early in SpaceX. Following the SpaceX IPO at a much higher valuation, the stake "now exceeds EUR 200 million, representing a multiple of approximately 20 times our invested capital." Management even hedged the exposure to lock the gain. Then a Q&A question strips the story to its bones: excluding SpaceX, would the investment fund return have been only EUR 13 million? “Yes, I can confirm this figure.” — Sébastien Coquard, Deputy Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-24 That is the whole ballgame. Strip out one private position and the headline "strong" fund performance nearly evaporates — a concentration risk management is candid about, and one reason they hedged rather than doubled down. When asked directly about AI exposure, Douin was equally plain: “Valor Equity is a fund that is exposed to growth company in U.S. and in the Silicon Valley, and so the exposure to SpaceX was very attractive. We will see whether in the different portfolio we have other growing exposure. But we are not exposed to the very large other AI companies today.” — Sébastien Coquard, Deputy Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-24 No AI froth here — just one exceptional legacy bet.Dividends over buybacks — a deliberate choice
The market prices Peugeot Invest at a discount to NAV north of 60%. The obvious lever is a buyback, and Douin acknowledges it. But he rejects it, and his reasoning is unusually honest:So the family-controlled vehicle will keep returning cash via dividends instead — EUR 3.25 per share maintained at the AGM despite the NAV decline and the absence of any Stellantis dividend this year, extending a decade-long run of roughly 7% annual growth. Readers should note the tension: the discount is the rationale for both the buyback and the refusal of it. Management has effectively decided the structural cause of the discount (thin float) is untouchable, and so it treats the symptom with yield. The same defensiveness shows up on decoupling — whether to separate the holding's performance from its auto legacy. Douin's answer is a careful non-answer: “at this stage, there is no project to do a decoupling or anything else. Look, any project will need to be considered carefully with both our majority and minority shareholders, but also ensure that it does not put Peugeot Invest itself in a negative position through any tax or legal consequences.” — Jean-Charles Douin, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-24 And on the stake itself, the framing is openly sentimental: “For Stellantis, clearly, it's not an ordinary investment. It's the historic investment of the business. For us, that's the way we treat it. We treat it as a legacy investment.” — Jean-Charles Douin, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-09-24 Legacy, in holding-company language, often means "not for sale."look, share buyback is definitely part of the toolbox. The reason we have been relatively shy at looking at share buybacks in the past is because we think that the relatively small free float of Peugeot Invest is one of the reason of the discount. We do not want to increase, or we do not want to narrow, I guess, the free float through share buyback.