General Motors' shares ended its 93-year stay on the stock market with a sub-one-dollar value of 75 cents a piece, as it exits the bourses today as America's biggest ever industrial bankruptcy victim.
GM shares, which were listed at the New York Stock Exchange on December 20, 1916, were worth close to about $100 a piece in 2000.
The going-under of this iconic carmaker has been billed as a "surgical bankruptcy" by the government for its revival into a new GM in the next two-three months, but the long- running restructuring exercise could not help avoid a loss of over $10 billion in the past one year for investors.
In its last trading session yesterday, the shares managed to attain $1-mark when it rose to an intra-day high of $1.01, but closed the day at 75 cents. As a kind of solace, there were no losses on the last trading day as the stock ended flat after recouping the early morning losses.
Soon after the company filed for bankruptcy, the shares fell by as much as 64 per cent to hit its lowest level of 27 cents. Also after the company filed for bankruptcy protection, the NYSE announced that GM would be delisted from the bourses and there would be no trade in the shares from June 2 onwards.
Based on its last trading price, GM's market capitalisation stood at about $457.2 million. This put the valuation at just about one-tenth of the level America's largest carmaker enjoyed way back in 1929, when its market cap was over $4 billion.
A year ago also, when GM was already hit by the crisis, its market cap stood at about $11 billion. Besides, the company enjoyed a valuation of as high as about $60 billion at the beginning of this decade, when the stock was being traded near $100 a share level.
