American Airlines parent AMR's stock falls as exec awards due

Dallas Morning News ^ | 4/15/08 | Terry Maxon

[cowtowney]

As luck would have it, AMR Corp. couldn't have picked a worse time to reward its top people with company stock.

American Airlines Inc., its principal subsidiary, is coming off a week with 3,300 flights canceled due to inadequate inspections and modifications. And Wall Street analysts expect AMR to report a quarterly loss of around $300 million Wednesday, the parent company's worst first quarter in five years.

On top of all that, the company's stock price is trading near four-year lows – less than one-fourth the price 15 months ago.

Still, the company this week is set to distribute around 4.3 million shares, valued about $40 million – albeit the smallest distribution since the awards first angered unions and employees in 2005.

[untrained skeptic]

Looks to me like they are taking their hit, and are already starting to recover a bit. They're up 3% for the day.

However, looking at the stock price isn't really going to prove either of us right or wrong.

AMR's biggest his is going to be from having to cancel so many flights recently. They lost a lot of revenue from that.

As for future bookings, it's been proved time and time again that the biggest factor there is price. I'm very doubtful that there is even a noticeable dip in bookings when they hand out these bonuses each year.

[cowtowney]

http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2008/04/14/daily29.html?jst=b_ln_hl

[cowtowney]

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AMR#chart3:symbol=amr;range=1y;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

And the stock just keeps falling