The chief executive officer of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. said the movie-theater chain is once again “under attack” from short sellers after skirting bankruptcy during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. The volume of short sales — bets that the stock will go down — rose about 50% in March to 73.8 million shares, CEO Adam Aron said in a discussion with the social-media finance commentator Trey Collins. In a wide-ranging interview, he also touched on a proposal to raise new equity and praised the meme investors who bid the stock up to more than $20 a share in January. The shares have since retreated from that lofty level. But they rose as much as 9.4% on Thursday after Aron said he has no immediate plans to issue any of the 500 million new shares the company is asking shareholders to authorize. The company won’t seek to sell those shares in 2021 but rather in the coming years. Aron is seeking to carry out a long-term growth plan that could silence AMC’s doubters. “There are strategies we have that are very good for AMC, to come out of this pandemic, to rebuild this company,” Aron said. “But not only get back to where we were, I’d like to keep going. And I’d like to grow this company even more so.” Aron also reflected on the difficult stretch the theater chain endured. In 2019, revenue averaged $450 million a month. It slumped virtually to zero a little over a year ago, after the pandemic forced theaters to close. The chain was weeks away from running out of cash at least five times, and has since restructured its finances, banking enough cash to last through most of 2021. Other theaters have succumbed to the COVID-19 struggle. ArcLight Cinemas and Pacific Theatres, two jointly owned California movie-theater chains, announced plans this week to close permanently, underscoring the still-tenuous state of the industry.
