🔎AAOI has sold 8.11 million of its own shares for about $1.1 billion since March | Friday's $600M shelf is the third this year $AAOI
A $600 million shelf was registered at exactly the same size three months ago. What Applied Optoelectronics $AAOI filed after the close on August 21 lets it sell up to $600 million of its own stock into the market. The May 14 shelf was for exactly $600 million too. What differs is the share price the paperwork assumes: the May filing used $223.10, this one uses the August 20 close of $129.10. On Monday the shares sold off from Friday's $124.82 close and touched $102.10.
When you pay in stock, the dollar amount can stay the same while the number of shares does not.
The quarterly report filed on August 6 carries the month-by-month record.
- March: 3,753,300 shares / weighted average $104.03 / $390.4 million
- April: 1,077,126 shares / $101.72 / $109.6 million
- May: 1,943,789 shares / $181.24 / $352.3 million
- June: 1,001,308 shares / $197.26 / $197.5 million
Four months, 7,775,523 shares, $1,049.8 million gross. Net of commissions the company kept $1,028.8 million.
There were two shelves. The first opened at $250 million on February 26, was raised to $500 million on March 12, and was used up by April 2: about 4.8 million shares at a weighted average of $103.51. That is why March and April add to exactly $500 million. The second was the $600 million shelf of May 14. It sold $549.8 million in May and June, then another 332,428 shares for roughly $49.2 million after June 30. As of August 20 that came to $599.0 million, leaving about $1 million of the $600 million. The third shelf was registered the next day.
Why the drawing does not stop shows up on the investing side of the same report. Net cash used in investing for the first half was $633.7 million, 8.4 times the $75.2 million of a year earlier. Capital expenditures accounted for $335.1 million of it ($169.0 million in the US, $62.8 million in Taiwan, $103.3 million in China). Most of the rest is prepayment for equipment and buildings: other assets, net swelled from $50.9 million at year-end to $324.0 million at June 30. That is machinery paid for but not yet delivered. First-half revenue was $343.1 million, so the cash that went out through investing is close to twice what came in through sales.
It did not come from operations. Operating cash flow for the half was an outflow of $73.8 million. Very little came from banks: net line-of-credit borrowings of $22.2 million in the half, plus $1.7 million of notes payable and long-term debt, with $106.5 million of credit lines still undrawn at June 30. Over the same six months the ATM netted $1,028.8 million. It came from the share count.
The company is not hiding this. The August 6 report says the Board may authorize additional issuance of common stock under an at-the-market offering in the future should additional liquidity be needed. The August 21 8-K says the company has no obligation to sell any shares and may suspend sales at any time. Nor are the proceeds tied to capital spending: the filing lists general corporate purposes, which may include debt repayment, working capital, capital expenditures and acquisitions. The shelf is a right, not a duty.
A right costs whatever the stock is worth on the day it is exercised.
At $197.26 a share, $600 million costs 3.04 million shares. At $107, a level the stock touched on Monday, it costs 5.61 million. The ownership one share bought in June now takes 1.84 shares. The capital budget can hold perfectly still, and the share price will still decide how much ownership leaves the existing holders.
Shares outstanding went from 74,998,000 at year-end to 84,906,289 on August 20, up 13.2%. Of the 9.9 million added, 8,107,951 came out of these shelves. Monday's decline reached 18% at its worst, more than three times the 5.5% dilution implied by selling $600 million at $129.10. That gap is wider than the size of the shelf alone explains, and my read is that what the market is watching is how fast a shelf empties. The November quarterly report will carry the next rows of that same monthly table. The weighted average from July through August 20 was about $148. If the rows from September sit well below that, the third shelf was sold into the decline.
The $600 million on the shelf is not a statement of how much this company needs. It is a statement of how much it is willing to pay in stock. The scale of the need sits on the other side of the report, in the $633.7 million that went out through investing in the first half, and that figure does not shrink when the stock does. Factories are priced in dollars. What moves is only the amount of ownership handed over to pay for them.
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