Hertz Hurts: Car Rental Firm Opens 10% Below IPO Price Despite Brady Tweet

Well that didn’t go as planned…

Despite Tom Brady (newly recruited pitchman for the company) proclaiming via Twitter that the newly re-public Hertz shares would go “to the mooooon…”…

To the moooooon…@Hertz #IPO #LETSGO pic.twitter.com/eNHDP4acrK

— Tom Brady (@TomBrady) November 9, 2021

…the car rental company’s stock opened 9.5% below where its share-offering just priced.

The company said late Monday that an upsized offering by selling stockholders of 44.52 million shares priced at $29 a share, compared with previous expectations that the 37.10 million-share offering would price between $25 and $29 a share.

The stock’s first trade on the Nasdaq was at $26.25 at 12:14 p.m. Eastern for 2.82 million shares

In the run-up to the IPO, Hertz ‘reportedly’ placed an order for 100,000 Teslas as part of an ambitious plan to to electrify its rental-car fleet (although everyone involved seemed very wary of discussing the details).

The deal with Tesla is about meeting customer demands and preparing for the future, according to Mark Fields, interim chief executive officer.

“This is not only a turnaround, this is a transformation of Hertz,” he said in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg TV.

“In business you have to start looking around the corner.”

For the car-rental business, he said that includes electrification, shared mobility and connected cars. Hertz wants to be out front of those trends.

The company was forced to file for bankruptcy in early 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic sapped demand for rentals. It emerged from Chapter 11 about five months ago under the ownership of a group that includes Knighthead Capital Management, Certares Management and Apollo Global Management Inc.