Quote from DeltaSpread:
On the brink of their collapse, Sirius actually had $4B in debt and their near term corp notes were trading at 15 cents on the dollar.
Blockbuster currently has $975M in debt. $300M of this is in the form of 2012 sub notes and the rest is a very recent restructured chunk of secured debt put together by none other than JPMorgan.
For those talking about the store closings, that is part of the digital remodeling business strategy. They are decreasing their retail foot print as they roll out 10,000 blue kiosks in 2010. They were very smart about this and did not rush into it. They picked up NCR as a partner and NCR is completely flipping the bill.
Blockbuster also now has exclusive on demand movie purchase and rental capability off their website, cheaper than cable on demand, for all new release movies. A good majority of the revenues on hot new releases comes within that first month. Now Redbox nor Netflix gets a piece of this, which means Blockbuster revs will get a nice bump.
Blockbuster is cutting $250M in costs this year. They are in the midst of selling off Euro assets as well which will yield conservatively another $75M in cash.
Recent other on demand partnerships include Samsung, Phillips, TIVO, and the first cell phone service for the new T Mobile HD line.
Blockbuster now has the same exact service that Netflix and Redbox provides, but only better and cheaper. Blockbuster's mail bluray plan is $4 cheaper than Netflix. For old movies that Redbox specializes in, Blockbuster offers the same at $1. Eventually there will be download capability at the blue kiosks, you will also be able to exchange at store and or kiosk and or with your online mail plan or total access plan. Wait til the actual marketing and advertising on this kicks in.
Allot of folks are upset with Netflix and if you browse some of the tech/HD forums you will see lots of them who were complaining about the recent 28 day release agreement ended up going back to blockbuster.
Netflix is now cornering itself as a streaming niche. Which is fine. You can't stream 1080p though with lossless audio and you cant get the newest movie releases either from Netflix. People realize this and will start downgrading their Netflix plans going with the $8.99 only per month with unlimited streaming. So Netflix is going to get hit on two different sides with respect to revs as this plays out.
And last but not least, in the most recent 10K, it was announced by the CFO that blockbuster is in the midst of successfully wrapping up a recapitilization effort that would not only take care of this overhanging debt, but it would also negate the need for a reverse stock split thus fulfilling the NYSE listing requirement.
Also worth noting is that Wattles has been buying a mother load of the common shares on the open market, while some other unknown entity continues loading millions and millions face amount blocks of the 2012 notes on the open bond market.
Bottom line is, this debt is gonna get service one way or the other. Either they are going to get a cash fusion like Sirius did and the stock is a 4-5 bagger from here easily or they will have to do some kind of debt for equity stock swap in which case, dilution will occur.