Ridiculous. He posts numbers and facts you don't like and you reply with this. This reminds me of the court scene in Idiocracy.
I can understand his anger. He's fairly new at VX so he's got an emotional investment. I've poked him in the ribs to see if he has any investment information that I can use, but he appears to be an empty vessel on that subject (reference the 16th century author William Baldwin).
I think the rub is that a conclusion is being drawn on what could be argued to be incomplete facts.
The reality is, that as a private corporation VA is most likely reporting the minimum financial information required. In addition, it has been explained to those that work there, that as a privately held business much what is shown as "debt" on the balance sheet as a "non-public" company, would be considered considered "equity" in a public company. Simply meaning that a public IPO would essentially swap the new investor equity for the existing investor debt. I believe a similar process took place as a result of Spirit's IPO.
None of it really matters though. The only reality is that VA is still in business, still accepting a/c and still adapting their model. Because of this, the only assumption that makes sense (to me) is that there is probably more to the business than meets the eye, and that the investors are apparently content with the status quo.
Respectfully,
S
I pull all of my numbers from public sources; there's a lot data out there if you know where to look. I get a lot of numbers from the DOT's BTS.
The Spirit IPO that you reference netted ~$170M; $150M was used as additional capital on the balance sheet. The ~$20M was used to pay off debt. The remainder of the debt was converted to equity at the IPO price. Spirit had ~$325M of debt (long term + short term) at the IPO; ~$305M was converted to common stock.
VX has $1.08B in debt (long term + short term). That's a much bigger chunk of debt to convert to equity and makes it much tougher to do an IPO.
VX has been around for more than 5 years and still isn't able to string together more than 2 quarters of operating profits. Now that they've cancelled aircraft orders, will they start to make money? Maybe, but they keep blowing opportunities.
Example: I watched Cush on CNBC proclaim how VX is dropping fares on EWR-SFO by 30%. That fare (I did the math) is well below VX's breakeven. Wouldn't a 10% fare reduction have been more than sufficient? It would have gotten them much closer to breakeven.
The net result is that multiple airlines have started adding a lot of capacity that directly competes with VX.
I use all of the information I gather here for investments (I've got several different directions that I could take this exchange). One of the things I've gained from my exchanges here is a deeper insight into what VX management is telling the worker bees. Sounds like SSDD to me, but I'll wait and see what the 4Q numbers reveal.
Speaking of gathering investment information, the Trainer refinery discussion was great for me because I looked at pipeline investment opportunities. In the end, I ruled out investing in pipelines because they've already been bid up by those seeking yield (most pipeline investments are MLPs).
I imagine a lot of people don't care one way or the other about VX. But keep in mind that most pilots at majors get profit sharing. If VX comes in and undercuts fares (in spite of losing money on every ticket they sell), your airline is also going to cut prices which is going to partially come out of your pocket because your airline's less profitable.
