Again, I don't think the information in this post accurately portrays the situation.
1) I do not think you understand how the market moves. You do not need anyone to buy 1.6 billion dollars worth of VAC stock for the market value to go back up to where it was. All you need a marginal buyer that makes the balance to tilt the other way. 200 million dollars is a lot of money and they do not even have to spend it all to buy back the stock.
I don't think you understand how a share buyback works. It's not an "in market" transaction. The Company repurchases it's own shares at a set price either based on a public offer or in a private transaction with an institutional shareholder. In either case, at current prices, what $220mn could buyback is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of share value wiped off VAC in the last month. At current prices, they could buyback a maximum of 6.01% of outstanding shares. That purchase would increase per share book value by the same percentage. VAC is currently trading at 1.24 times book value, so assuming the market performed perfectly (and assuming no other market forces at play...forces like the imminent economic downturn), at best you'd get a 7.45% bump in share price. That's compared to the 30% drop in share price in the past 30 days at a cost of not booking ANY of the cash as revenue and whatever long-term effects management might believe (correctly or not) they sacrifice by quick mass enrollment. There's several other ways you could shape the model, but none of them gets you anything close to a recovery, all in an environment where every other player is also suffering, the US gov't is promising "assistance" to your industry and interest rates are racing to zero. Again, I see no reason to sacrifice whatever business model on the new product they have or are developing for these pennies in the current environment.
Can you provide the source when you said that the company is "drowning in losses"
Apologies if I was unclear - given your implication they would use this money for a share buyback (with some unexplained link to this achieving their bonuses), reference was intended to refer to share price losses, not VAC results.
2) i do not know if they have receive at once the maintenance fees we paid already or if the resorts pay them monthly. Where do you have that information from? But even if VAC is paid monthly the management fee, it does not change anything, they are getting the money regardless of what happens because the money is in the bank already and the contract is a % of the MF, it has nothing to do with other factors
The maintenance fee money is not in VAC accounts because it's not their money. They collect it on behalf of the owners associations. What is theirs is the monthly fees paid to them on their management fee contracts. This is all outlined in their annual report.
3) where do you get your statistics from? What happened with the first 100 who had the virus in the first 2 weeks in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, South Korea. By the way, in South Korea has had 8,000 cases so far and it started earlier than in Italy as far as I know. Yes, they have better detection but that explains why it did not spread more but it does not explain the low mortality rate since there is no cure for this at this moment.
Even in S. Korea, where their strategy of trace, test and treat (which starts with MASS testing from day 1) has been attributed to keeping the mortality rate extremely low, the rate is 0.7% (compared to current global rate of 3.4% calculated by the WHO). Seasonal flu has a mortality rate of 0.1% - that means in the current best case scenario, COVID-19 has seven times the mortality of the seasonal flu. The effect of that is exponential given COVID-19 has a higher transmission rate than the seasonal flu and is more infectious (because it is novel, we have not developed any antibodies towards it). Finally, combine all of that with the likelihood the resulting numbers completely overwhelm the health system (meaning at some point in the infection curve, those requiring critical care can't get it because their aren't enough beds, nurses and equipment) and you have the potential for a real disaster. This is no joke - if we cannot flatten that infection curve, mortality rates will exceed the current averages and not look anything like that in S. Korea (which is already BAD compared to seasonal flu). And here's another statistic - S. Korea has 12 hospital beds per 1000 population; the US has 2.8 beds per 1000.
Bottom line, we should thank our lucky stars if this does "not go away quickly" because it likely means we've flattened the infection curve so it's spread out longer but with a much lower peak. I do not want to be speaking with my family and friends in America about how hospitals have had to stop treating many of the elderly altogether because the limited resources must be directed to those most likely to survive (the same conversations I am currently having with Italian friends and family).
Useful resources with statistics
here,
here and
here.
