Could these be the final days of Six Flags?

[Airtime&Gravity]

^Six Flags does own Discovery Kingdom as they bought it from the city either earlier this year or some time last year.

[OFortuna]

As said, Discovery Kingdom was purchased in 2007. It can't operate year round and it sits on about the most expensive real estate available in the chain. SFA's a popular pick when it comes to doomy futures too. Nothing's worse than SFKK. They closed a huge chunk of the park off and just didn't run it this past year in addition to the massive accident last year.

[EastCoastn07]

Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is the chain's most improved park and has set record attendance at the park the past few years...if they chose to sell the park, they would be really dumb, but I would love to see a company like Busch Entertainment take over that park and help it live it up to its potential. Its such a great park and I just feel it could be better operated by another chain, but if Six Flags did choose to sell it, I think it'd be a big mistake. They should be more worried about selling off their parks that aren't making any money, which Six Flags Discover Kingdom is actually doing.

[larrygator]

I would be surprised if any of the current SF parks are not making money. The problem is they are not making enough money to cover interest on their debt.

[sam06pr]

Six Flags Discovery Kingdom is the chain's most improved park and has set record attendance at the park the past few years...if they chose to sell the park, they would be really dumb, but I would love to see a company like Busch Entertainment take over that park and help it live it up to its potential. Its such a great park and I just feel it could be better operated by another chain, but if Six Flags did choose to sell it, I think it'd be a big mistake. They should be more worried about selling off their parks that aren't making any money, which Six Flags Discover Kingdom is actually doing.

 

oooh that would be cool if BEC buys SFDK...the problem is BEC will probably be sold. lol. I dunno, I think if SF were to sell a park it would probably be SFA, not sure why they will sell SFDK, it looks like is doing very good.

[speedracer]

^ Yeah SFDK is known as one of the few SF parks turning a profit consistently, they'd be absolute fools to sell off one of their few cash cows. With the housing/mortgage/economy crisis, and the resulting enormous housing/office vacancy throughout the Bay Area, no one's building jack anymore and land values aren't what they used to be.

 

And not exactly sure what not being open year round has to do with it either considering SF only owns 1 year round park, which they tried to unload just a few years ago.

[Sean Menefee]

As said, Discovery Kingdom was purchased in 2007. It can't operate year round and it sits on about the most expensive real estate available in the chain.

 

Discovery Kingdom used to operate year round in the Marine World Africa USA days. Our weather here in Northern California isn't much of a problem, if ever during the winter months. SFDK's season has also been getting progressively longer over the last few years. (Open till New Years, re-opens in early March. For 2008, the park also added operating days for the entire month of November unlike last season.)

 

The city of Vallejo just went bankrupt, so I'm not seeing that as prime real estate for strip malls and track housing, no matter how inflated Bay Area prices are.

 

-Sean

[goatdan]

Reality check: Six Flags, at its peak, had 47 properties making money for it. It now has 26. The chain has been cut in half, but the debt wasn't because the value of the assets they sold, in general, was nowhere near what they had paid for them or had invested in them. The original executive team ran out of the company with millions of dollars in the bank and the stockholders and park goers have gotten brutally shafted. It should be no surprise then that the company was built on the work of real estate investors looking for a quick buck given how things have turned out.

 

I'd argue pretty strongly that the chain hasn't been cut in half. The last seven parks they sold were:

 

Darien Lake

Elitch Gardens

Frontier City and White Water Bay

Watertown USA

Wild Waves and Enchanted Village

 

All seven of those parks combined drew 3.6 million visitors, or just slightly north of 500,000 people apiece per year. By comparison, don't parks like Great Adventure, Great America, Texas and Magic Mountain draw over 2 million visitors apiece?

 

Also, I'd assume that Six Flags is selling off the parks that make the least profit and holding onto the ones that are already well established. While the company has definitely slimmed down, I think that saying that the chain has been cut in half may be correct from a general public person looking at it, but not from someone looking into the overall size and operation of the chain, where at most they probably shed about 1/3rd of the company.

 

And, realistically, I think the argument could be made that nothing that was sold *should* have been in the Six Flags portfolio to begin with. With the possible exceptions of Six Flags Worlds of Adventure (which now they look sort of genius on) and Six Flags AstroWorld, I don't think any of the other parks upheld what people expected in the Six Flags "brand", and therefore shedding them was exactly what they needed to do.

[coasterdude5]

Today in Economics we had to pick five different corporations to watch over the next six weeks. Being a true coaster nerd, I picked park corporations. With $2,000, I was able to buy nearly 6,000 shares with Six Flags...

[CoasterRog]

Being a true coaster nerd, I picked park corporations.

 

I hope it was play money because you just committed the cardinal sin of investing: not diversifying.

[BrownStreak]

About this same exact time last year I had to do a small Excel Spreadsheet Project for a class. The assignment was fairly easy and open-ended and simply had to deal with the stock market. I chose to list five theme park related companies: BUD (Anheuser), DIS (Disney), MGM (MGM-Mirage), FUN (Cedar-Fair), and SIX (Six Flags). Even then FUN and DIS were listing at $23.45 and $34.99 a share and SIX was down at $3.34. It is not surprising to me that in a crisis a stock that was already in trouble a year ago would have HUGE problems. FUN has dropped 32% as has DIS. Oddly the biggest drop was MGM falling from $97 to $11!

[sixflagsguy5]

I think now that they've filtered out a lot of the smaller parks that were costing them money to keep, they'll be fine. If they're planning on selling any more parks, we'll know which ones if there's a small park without anything new being added or any park upgrades. I'm worried about La Ronde and Six Flags America. La Ronde was extremely dead when we went there this year and a lot of rides were closed down, even during the nice part of the day. I haven't been to Six Flags Mexico or Discovery Kingdom, but I'll definitely go to one of those parks this year just in case they close.

[generaleclectic]

David and I bought some SIX stock about 2 months before the market tanked mainly for the shear novelty of having the stock. SFoG is our home park, so it just seemed to be the cool thing to do.

 

Now that we're official stockholders in the company and we've both pumped a good deal of research into the back-end of the company, I believe that they will bounce back. We as Americans need to give the market rescue some time to work. I won't go into all the mechanics because if you want to know, you can tune into CNBC or MSNBC or Fox Noise (yeah I meant to spell it that way) or whatever news channel you want to get the skinny. Personally my personal advocate in all this is Jim Cramer, but I digress.

 

SF has some work to do for sure. The three big blights on the brand right at the moment are America, Kentucky Kingdom, and Jazzland. SFA is a shambles. They're poorly managed, the park looks horrible and the rides are in dire need of some love. Kentucky Kingdom... well, I won't beat that dead horse. The one blight that everyone seems to overlook is Jazzland.

 

SF is fighting like all hell with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to get out of the 75 year lease they assumed when they bought the park. It's just not economically sound for the company to re-open the thing because attendance was on a steady year-over-year decline from the moment they bought it. It's hell and gone from the major tourist traps in New Orleans and the insurance companies aren't paying out to SF from the Katrina damage. SF could solve about 25% of their problem if they could somehow resolve the Jazzland thing. Ray Nagin, however, has a responsibility to put the best interests of the city above that of business which he has consistently done. I guess he gets points for that, but in the meantime, SF is paying out money on a dead park in the form of Rent, Property Tax, Liability Insurance & legal costs to fight both The City of New Orleans and the insurance companies.

 

Do I see Six Flags tanking anytime soon? No. They have enough inter-park communication going on among park presidents and directors of operations where they should be able to come up with a solution for most of their issues. I think they need to be following the leads of SFNE, SFGAd, and SFMM and they'll really pull it out of the dumper. Since we're now officially in the off season, I wouldn't look for SF to break the $1.00 mark anytime soon. Keep in mind too that they have until April before they have to start thinking about a reverse split which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.