This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Gulp!... McClatchy stock falls to all time low, closes at 87 cents a share
McClatchy (MNI) shares plunged Monday, closing at 87 cents. Unbelievable.
UPDATE: 5 years ago this week, McClatchy was at $67.99 a share.
UPDATE #2: Fitz and Jen say McClatchy is in danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. . .
I remember being at a company meeting sometime in 2004 or 2005, before the KR deal. One question asked of the executives: "When is the stock going to split? When is it going to split?"
Everybody liked looking at the stock chart then. The stock was trading in the low-to-mid $70s at that point.
The stock is now trading at about 1% of those highs. Thankfully, I got out of the ESP and cashed out my stocks before the KR deal closed.
Sometime in 2007, at another meeting, an executive told us not to worry that the stock was in the teens. Wall Street didn't know how to value us. We we're still profitable. We still had good cash flow. Besides, if the stock dropped below $10, the board may consider buying all the public shares and go private. That didn't happen.
At another meeting in 2008, after the first round of layoffs, the stock was at about $7.50. One exec was at an employee Q&A and shrugged off discussion of the faltering stock. He said -- and I'm quoting almost to the word here because I remember it vividly -- "If the stock falls below a dollar and we get traded on the pink sheets, that's okay."
There were people in the room still -- yes, still -- on the ESP plan at that point. That had to hurt.
In this same Q&A, the exec discussed a possible restructuring of the debt as a way to give the company more breathing room to avoid more layoffs. This ended up happening in September of this year when the stock had fallen below $5.
I mentioned the little anecdote about the exec practically embracing the pink sheets to an associate who knew a lot more about finance that I did, and he was pretty shocked. He said things had to be pretty bad for exec to say anything close to that, publicly or privately.
Anonymous 2:53 PM ------------ That was a great inside look from an employee. As I read McC. employee comments, it seems some are very bitter about Gary Pruitt’s decision to purchase KR, and many think that it is the main reason MNI is in dire trouble today.
Did you ever hear what the KR employees felt about the merger at first? It looks like Pruitt’s rosy colored financial picture fades to pink slips, and pink sheets.
..Management changed the Bee from a fact based reporting model to a here's-what-we-believe-and-you-should-too model. They constructed their reporting to enhance their biases. The bastards deserve to go bust. In a business where trust is the bedrock of everything, McClatchy is way overpriced at 87 pennies a share.
11 comments:
.95 at 13:15
Wow, this is getting harder. Now, I have to sell at least twenty-nine shares of McClatchy stock in order to buy their new Obama book.
off 7 percent, down to 96 cents, broke through the all-time low area and sinking faster and faster.
Think of the irony of a share Of McClatchy stock with less value than Sunday edition of a McClatchy paper.
Soon the stock will be worth less than the cost of a daily edition.
82 cents, and slipping astonishingly even more. off 18 percent. why? investors see bankruptcy
$0.88 at the end, an historic all-time low, off 15 percent. Double digit decreases as McClatchy heads to zero.
85 pennies at close.
In the words of Nelson Muntz...
Ha-Hahhhh!!!
Glug, glug. Robert Ballard will have to come find them.
I remember being at a company meeting sometime in 2004 or 2005, before the KR deal. One question asked of the executives: "When is the stock going to split? When is it going to split?"
Everybody liked looking at the stock chart then. The stock was trading in the low-to-mid $70s at that point.
The stock is now trading at about 1% of those highs. Thankfully, I got out of the ESP and cashed out my stocks before the KR deal closed.
Sometime in 2007, at another meeting, an executive told us not to worry that the stock was in the teens. Wall Street didn't know how to value us. We we're still profitable. We still had good cash flow. Besides, if the stock dropped below $10, the board may consider buying all the public shares and go private. That didn't happen.
At another meeting in 2008, after the first round of layoffs, the stock was at about $7.50. One exec was at an employee Q&A and shrugged off discussion of the faltering stock. He said -- and I'm quoting almost to the word here because I remember it vividly -- "If the stock falls below a dollar and we get traded on the pink sheets, that's okay."
There were people in the room still -- yes, still -- on the ESP plan at that point. That had to hurt.
In this same Q&A, the exec discussed a possible restructuring of the debt as a way to give the company more breathing room to avoid more layoffs. This ended up happening in September of this year when the stock had fallen below $5.
I mentioned the little anecdote about the exec practically embracing the pink sheets to an associate who knew a lot more about finance that I did, and he was pretty shocked. He said things had to be pretty bad for exec to say anything close to that, publicly or privately.
Anonymous 2:53 PM
------------
That was a great inside look from an employee. As I read McC. employee comments, it seems some are very bitter about Gary Pruitt’s decision to purchase KR, and many think that it is the main reason MNI is in dire trouble today.
Did you ever hear what the KR employees felt about the merger at first? It looks like Pruitt’s rosy colored financial picture fades to pink slips, and pink sheets.
..Management changed the Bee from a fact based reporting model to a here's-what-we-believe-and-you-should-too model. They constructed their reporting to enhance their biases. The bastards deserve to go bust. In a business where trust is the bedrock of everything, McClatchy is way overpriced at 87 pennies a share.
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