Yeah, as I remember it's a little over 1 billion shares.
My reasoning has always been that Stratus will be sure to hang on to enough shares to keep them in the majority.
As far as the preferred shares go, my speculation is something like this:
1. PELE appears to have access to funding without Stratus converting any shares for funding purposes. My guess is only a couple of million shares will be converted to cash for Stratus to likely fund their other events.
2. There will be mergers/purchases that will involve the preferred shares thus giving a percentage of ownership to the acquisition target. Likewise, another TV deal like the previous one with CBS could involve the broadcast partner gaining a percentage of the company as part of the deal. This is where Stratus will want to maintain enough shares so as not to relenquish majority ownership to the new partner...that is, unless the deal is sweet enough.
3. Shares will be used to keep key individuals with the company. But again, most of us expect this to be trading over $1 once it starts trading. So it would be unlikely these amounts of shares would be excessive as a few million shares would equal one wealthy individual.
I think #2 will be the first time we see something significant done with the preferred shares and my guess is we'll see that happen in the first quarter of 2012.
Of course, this is all my opinion but it's based largely on my fairly extensive knowledge of the individuals involved with running the company and what they've done in the past.
Go PELE!
AI
