From Landon Manning
AMC, a well-known theater chain with more than little experience in the world of chaotic online investing, has announced that it will accept customer payments in Bitcoin (BTC) until the end of 2021.
That news was published by the Washington Post on August 10, after AMC shareholders and executives discussed the company’s financial results for the second quarter of the year. To incorporate the company’s ongoing successes into fiscal 2021, CEO Adam Aron announced that the world’s largest cinema chain will also be the first to venture into Bitcoin, allowing theater customers to purchase cinema tickets and concessions from BTC.
This may seem like a surprising move from such a prominent global company, especially since this program was planned and announced without any other big players in the industry even whispering anything similar to it. And yet there are reasons why AMC in particular would be amenable to such a plan, and even more reasons why it might be the right step to bet on Bitcoin.
2021 was (to put it mildly) a big year for AMC. Around the same time that Bitcoin’s star really began to rise in January 2021, the Reddit community’s short squeeze, r / WallStreetBets, drove AMC along with other companies to astronomical heights, eventually reaching a price of $ 60 per share. The current valuation of around $ 34 per share may seem like small potatoes in comparison, but it needs to be compared to the fact that the price was only $ 2 on Jan. 1.
Aron commented that AMC locations worldwide will complete this Bitcoin acceptance rollout by the end of the year, but did not provide any further information. However, he added that the rollout would coincide with the rollout of Google Pay and Apple Pay, “since we had to do the IT programming to accept Bitcoin anyway.”
“I had to learn more about blockchain and cryptocurrency in the last six months than in the entire decade before,” Aron told shareholders during the conference call.
“This expanded knowledge has given me the confidence to be able to tell you all today that AMC hereby officially announces in this appeal that we will have the IT systems by the end of the year to use Bitcoin as payment for cinema tickets and concessions for online purchases to be accepted in all of our US theaters, ”he added.
There are very few companies who can understand the new era of Bitcoin like AMC. With the two recently fueled concurrently by similar waves of decentralized internet investment, AMC seeks to learn from the experience what it can do. Indeed, for the world’s largest theater chain, learning from teachers like Bitcoin can be very important as the troubles that hit the old world of the movie business are likely to be permanent.
With the company generating $ 19 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2020, the second quarter of 2021 saw revenue of over $ 444 million in the first true phases of the global pandemic. Such dramatic improvements are only possible through a dynamic embrace of the latest developments, and Aron has proven he is ready to go the distance on this front through Bitcoin.
The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
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