A plan to combine SiriusXM’s main stock with Liberty Media’s tracking stock has been approved by investors at a special shareholder meeting held this week.
The stock swap is one major step toward restructuring the satellite and streaming radio broadcaster’s overall ownership, and will involve the creation of a new publicly-traded company that will continue to operate under the SiriusXM brand name, Liberty said in a press release on Friday.
Liberty Media currently owns 84 percent of SiriusXM, making it the largest individual shareholder of the company. Liberty Media founder John Malone has long favored tracking stocks that are tied to the performance of a particular subsidiary or segment, having utilized them in some of his other telecommunications businesses.
Liberty Media says it will voluntarily delist the tracking stock Liberty SiriusXM Group from the Nasdaq Global Select Market in early September. Around the same time, SiriusXM’s current stock will also be delisted, though the company — tentatively called “New Sirius” — will immediately begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “SIRI,” which is currently used by SiriusXM.
Current SiriusXM shareholders will receive one-tenth of a share of New Sirius common stock on September 9 at around 6 p.m., the company said. Fractional shares will be paid in cash. Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei is expected to serve as Chairman of the Board for New Sirius, while SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz will reprise that role for New Sirius.
As a business, SiriusXM has increased its investments in streaming radio and podcasts while struggling with low growth at its traditional satellite radio business. Radio subscribers have been relatively flat over the past few years, with SiriusXM reporting between 30 million and 33 million subscribers over the past two years.
On August 1, SiriusXM revealed it lost 173,000 customers during its most-recent financial quarter, including 100,000 customers who churned out of the service by ending their paid subscription.
That same day, SiriusXM executives announced plans to roll out a free, ad-supported tier of its satellite radio product, called SiriusXM Free Access. The plan offers a handful of music, talk and comedy channels in vehicles that are equipped with SiriusXM’s satellite-streaming hybrid receivers, called SiriusXM 360L. SiriusXM Free Access is only available once a customer’s free trial expires, and radio listeners must actually use their SiriusXM radio once every 30 days, or the plan is permanently removed from their receiver.
