Remember what you were doing on New Year's Eve in 2002? Oh, if only you had bought Taser (NASDAQ:TASR) at the split-adjusted closing price of $0.67 a share. You would be sitting on a 69-fold increase in stock price in less than two years. Hallelujah!
The company is in the process of trying to lower its stock price -- without cutting its market capitalization. For the third time this year (a Wall Street record?) the company is splitting its stock -- this time at 2 for 1. So, on November 29, there will be twice as many shares outstanding -- and the price should be, given normal market gyrations, half what it was the previous trading day.
So, what's the big deal? The company says the split will "...increase its market liquidity for the purpose of enhancing the securities' appeal to both private and institutional investors." Maybe, but if that were the case, is Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.A) not marketable at $83,150 a share? Hardly!
When this analyst first wrote about Taser, there were 9.6 million shares outstanding. That is extremely small when you compare it with the 5 billionWal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) and the 10 billion Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) shares. The comparison is meaningless, though, because Taser's annual sales and profits are an extremely small fraction of those giants'.
After the split, there will be 59.3 million shares of Taser outstanding. The split will not add cash to the balance sheet or have any other impact -- other than to create an expense to make the split announcement and distribute the new shares.
The news is that Taser is trying to lower the per-share price of its shares. That's it. There's nothing more. Have a great weekend.
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Fool contributor W.D. Crotty owns stock in Berkshire Hathaway.
