For serious moviegoers, the viewing experience might not be complete without popcorn, soda and now, perhaps, a share or two of stock.
AMC Entertainment Holdings, the parent company of AMC Theaters, plans to offer a small percentage of shares in its coming initial public offering to its “most loyal customers,†according to a filing the company made on Wednesday. The plan makes use of a new online equity platform that caters to individual investors.
Movie fans will be able to buy $100 to $2,500 of the AMC stock through Loyal3 Holdings, a brokerage firm that caters to smaller investors instead of larger institutions. AMC plans to to offer 21 million shares of its stock at $18 to $20 each.
AMC, which is owned by the Wanda Group, the Chinese real estate conglomerate, plans to offer 110,527 shares to fans and an additional 230,264 to employees. Individual investors will have to go through Loyal3, which will make its debut with the AMC offering.
AMC sent a letter to members of its loyalty rewards program to alert them to the plan, according to a person briefed on the matter.
This sort of direct-to-investor approach has been tried before, albeit with mixed results. Vonage, the Internet phone service provider, allowed small investors to participate in its 2006 I.P.O. Trading opened at $17 and fell 24 percent in a day. Today the stock is worth about $3.
The allotment for fans is just a small percentage of AMC’s proposed overall offering. But the company’s incentive for offering stock to loyal customers could extend beyond the trading floor.
“I would think that the company’s main motivation is a little bit of a marketing gimmick, hoping that some of the shareholders might be inclined to buy one more movie ticket a year, or if they’ve got a choice of which theater to go to, to go to an AMC theater rather than a competitor,†said Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at Cornell.
A spokeswoman for AMC declined to comment beyond the filings.
Citigroup, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays and Credit Suisse are running the deal.
