Spyker Stocks Soar, But Sergio Isn't Buying
Here’s a situation in a hypothetical tense for you. If you were the CEO of a car company which never made a profit in 11 years and you offered to pay $74 million for a car company which hasn’t made a profit since 2001 and had a badly damaged brand, how would you expect your share price to go? Trust me, you’re not even close. MarketWatch.com reports that Spyker shares soared as much as 74% when they announced they had reached an agreement to buy Saab from General Motors. Spyker’s market capitalisation is now €107 million, four times more than when GM first put Saab up for sale.
I like the Saab brand, [but] I think it’s very difficult to be a niche player and profitable. Marginal players will continue to be marginalized. We cannot build on hopes and dreams.
Unless the American government has been kind enough to underwrite those hopes and dreams, right Sergio?
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"What do the markets see that I don’t to warrant Spyker’s shares going up?" Simple. Spyker has now tapped into a flow of US taxpayer money, and probably some from Sweden too. Spyker is being paid to take Saab off the hands of Government Motors. Team Washington will pay a high price indeed to be extricated from their unpopular rescue of Detroit - as long as the exit can be made to look like something other than failure, and the price tag can be hidden.
I used to be a relatively happy curmudgeon, working on mostly Saabs for the last thirty years. Now unfortunately, I have to work on virtually everything. Our shop, and Im sure many others survive because of horribly engineered products made by Chrysler, followed closely by Jokeswagon/Audi and the other german wundercars. Sometimes, we really want to see copies of the degrees of the jackasses that sign off on this crap. And Sergio bought Chrysler? Talk about something that needed to be put out of everybodies misery.