Welcome to the wild world of convertible bonds, Adam Aron
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Kapitaalverhoging AMC :
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Adam Aron wants to be happier, healthier and find a clever way around his own retail shareholders to pay off some serious debt in 2022.
The chief executive of AMC Entertainment AMC, -6.75% took to Twitter on Monday morning to offer his resolutions for the new year, and they seemed to indicate that the memelord CEO spent a lot of time over the holidays thinking about AMC’s mountain of interest payments.
In a pair of tweets, Aron told his followers that “If we can, in 2022 I’d like to refinance some of our debt to reduce our interest expense, push out some debt maturities by several years and loosen covenants.”
He followed up by pledging “There is no guarantee of success, but we will try very hard to get this done. We are always thinking of creative ways to make AMC’s future more secure.”
But if Aron is really going to make any dents in the interest payments that he told investors in November had grown to $332 million in the first nine months of the year alone, he might have to be very creative indeed.
Having ridden 2021’s meme-stock wave, as its share price rose 1,250%, AMC is now both the darling and plaything of retail investor “Apes” who already pushed back on Aron’s attempt last summer to offer more shares of the then-red-hot stock.
Those Apes now take it as a borderline order of faith that their control of the free float is the best leverage they have to keep the short-betting hedge funds from pushing the stock price back down, and they have made it abundantly clear that Aron can do almost anything but create more shares of AMC.
For Aron, that poses something of a conundrum.
Parsing the language of his tweet, many AMC Apes believe that “loosen covenants” is a clue that Aron might take the internet’s advice and tokenize some AMC share dividends as NFTs, a plan that he has publicly pooh-pooh’ed on Twitter, citing AMC’s “debt covenants. “
@TaraBull808, a popular proponent of the share-tokenization plan seized on the word choice: