Tomorrow more than 682 million shares that today make up the entire floating capital of Aeroméxico will be worth “practically nothing”. What does this imply? For the airline, the process represents one of the last steps to complete its financial restructuring, which has lasted more than 20 months. However, for investors who still hold the company’s securities, it could mean a significant financial loss.
As part of its financial restructuring under Chapter 11, Aeroméxico will give rise to the entry of new shareholders, and with it, new capital for 4,266 million dollars (mdd), which implies the issuance of 682 billion new shares. This implies that the currently existing shares are diluted to just 0.0001% of the airline’s capital, that is, practically to zero.
“After the corresponding capital increase, the current shareholders will be almost completely diluted, so that their remaining shareholding will probably be minimal (if any),” the airline said in a statement sent to the Mexican Stock Exchange (BMV). in February 2021.
So that investors could avoid being completely diluted and recover part of their investment, Aeroméxico’s board of directors approved a public offer for the acquisition of shares (OPA) that was launched on February 14 and ends today, with the intention that Alinfra buy the shares from investors at a fixed price of 1 peso cent.
However, this price is significantly lower than the market price of the company’s shares. While at the beginning of the OPA the titles were located at 1.91 pesos, at its closing they plummeted to 0.60 pesos. Although this represents a drop of 68%, it is still higher than the price of 0.01 pesos of the OPA.
“We do not see a very important appetite for investors to acquire the OPA,” says Brian Rodríguez, an analyst at Monex Grupo Financiero.
“We saw that the market paid for the shares at a very attractive price. We attribute it to speculative issues; For an investor currently in the market, it is advisable to get out and sell. It is no longer just speculative, in some cases it is already a lack of information, to buy a share that tomorrow will no longer be worth anything”, he adds.
Starting tomorrow, an all-share concentration (also known as a reverse split ) of all shares will be done on the closing date (i.e., today), using a conversion factor where 5 million shares will be equivalent to 1 share of the new capital of Aeroméxico.
Specialists expect that this process and the entry of new capital will begin to have immediate effects, giving way to shares at an expected price of 18.9 dollars per share, which could be in a range of 360 to 380 pesos.
“We could say that tomorrow we would already be seeing the beginning of a new Aeroméxico,” concludes Rodríguez.
