Wanda Film Shares Close Limit Down After 16-Month Trading Halt
By Patrick Frater
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Shares of Wanda Film Holding were down by their 10% daily trading limit on Monday after they resumed trading for the first time in 16 months. The company has not yet completed its proposed restructuring scheme.
The shares are listed on the Shenzhen stock market, but have not been traded since July 2017, when the company announced an earlier draft of a corporate reorganization.
Chinese stock markets have a circuit breaker system which automatically halts trading in a stock when the price moves up or down beyond pre-set limits. It is not unknown for shares to move strongly in one direction, tripping the trading halt for several days in succession. Wanda Film’s shares closed at RMB31.1 apiece, limit down compared with their indicated relisting price. That is some 40% down compared with the last known price of RMB52.04 in July 2017.
Wanda Film, which contains most of Dalian Wanda Group’s cinema operation assets, has issued multiple drafts of a proposed restructuring which would allow the listed company to acquire film production and distribution operations through share issues. Earlier this year, it said that the reorganization would exclude Legendary Entertainment, the high-profile Hollywood producer that produced “Dark Knight” and “Jurassic World” and which Dalian Wanda acquired for up to $3.5 billion in January 2015.
Earlier versions of the reorganization plan have been questioned by stock market regulators over issues such as the asset value and the amount of goodwill of the proposed target companies. The latest version is understood to be 10% lower than the June 2018 published plan. It is still awaiting approval from regulators.
Last month Wanda Film revealed provisional trading data for September showing box office of RMB540 million and 12.8 million tickets sold. For the first nine months of the year gross box office in its theaters amounted to $1.08 billion (RMB7.54 billion), a 16% increase on 2017, and ticket sales of 181 million.
As of September, it operated 567 complexes in China, with a total screen count of 5,011.
