Random Thoughts on Life

Is AMS worth only $76 million?

So what is B&T up to with their offer? Well from my reading of the offer, it is more important what they are walking away from, the leases for the Dallas TX DC, Baltimore MD DC, Indianapolis IN DC, and San Diego CA corporate offices. (BTW any AMS employee reading this take note, you will not have an office to work in once this deal closes. If you get a written offer to move to North Carolina, good for you. For the rest, oh well it was fun while it lasted.) They are retaining the rights to the Sacramento CA DC, Indianapolis IN returns center, Ashland OR office, and the Bentonville AK office. Beyond that they are asking for their choice of APG inventory at 75 cents on the dollar, the A/R at 77.5 cents on the dollar, and everything not bolted down (and a lot of things that are) in all facilities they are abandoning, and everything in those they want to keep. To me this feels more like a first stab at a liquidation offer more than anything else. Keeping only the Sacramento DC is an expansion move by them (they have no DC west of the rockies, only one in Reno NV) to service CostCo. The Bentonville office is for local Sam's/Walmart represenatives, but I have no idea what the Ashland office is for. The Indy returns center has a brand new processing machine for stripping book covers and pulping books, so they could turn that into a central processing center for hurt books (it makes no sense to ship good books there only to ship them back to a DC.) The rest of it is simply them acquiring assets. Is all of it worth only $76 million? To B&T it is a good starting point for an offer. Either they think it is high enough to discourage other offers, or low enough to encourage one allowing them to collect their $2.4 million "Stalking Horse" protections and walk away from their work with something.

posted by MrPopman @ 5:42 PM