AMC investors will go to APE, company announcement

You might remember our friends at AMC, the theater chain with a pantsless CEO, who have totally embraced the meme stock thing. A crowd of enthusiastic retail investors may have saved AMC from going bankrupt. Now AMC hopes to tap them again to create more shares of the company.

This quarter, AMC announced a dividend for shareholders: AMC Preferred Equity Units, which will trade as APE on the New York Stock Exchange. One of these babies will exist for each common share and can be converted into common stock if the company and investors vote to do so.

That “if” is kind of sticky though. See, AMC wanted to sell more shares and investors rejected it. Maybe those investors don’t want to be any more lenient — AMC sold a lot of shares during the pandemic. Maybe something else is at play. But APE, the solution, isn’t just a good marketing plan to grab the attention of retailers. The run-up is around investors who voted against more shares. After offering about 500 million shares of APE to investors, AMC could sell 4.5 billion units in the broader market, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The news was released after the market. AMC shares closed at $18.66 today, and market shares were down nearly 8 percent at $17.16 at 5PM ET, indicating that investors aren’t too excited about the plan. Or maybe they didn’t like the company’s earnings numbers, which were released today: AMC’s revenue hasn’t recovered from the pandemic.