Tupperware is one of those brands that are part of our lives. Even our language. Five years ago, seven decades after the first container arrived at its destination, the RAE recognized that box He’s been living with our friends for too long. lunch boxes, and since then the brand and the meaning are one and the same. However, Tupperware warned a few months ago that it might not make it to 2023 and began filing for impending bankruptcy. What makes it even more bizarre is that his stock has surged up to 800% in the last week, in the last chapter action meme: As with another recent company in early 2021, Tupperware has become the new target of a handful of internet-based investors who want to troll and get rich at the same time.
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In January 2021, the target was Gamestop, a video game store chain cornered by the digital boom. Troll investors grouped together on a Reddit forum and with Elon Musk applause, took away a couple of investment funds (one of them from the man who increased the fortune of billionaire Michael Jordan). This time, despite the referent, no one saw the arrival of joking investors. Even those who a few days ago were still wondering what was going on at Tupperware. And that the position of the company was more than critical. At the end of June, the authorities of the New York Stock Exchange had already warned them that their capitalization (the market value of all their shares) was too small to continue operations: at that time Tupperware, in business since 1946, cost less than $50 million.. His debt, on the other hand, exceeded 700 million. And funds like Blackrock were already approaching the future corpse like Financial Samaritans to actually grab the pieces when the end comes.
From a company founded Earl Tupper left a little. Mr. Tupper was a charming inventor: not only did he invent plastic lunch boxes with a background as a chemist, but he also came up with a plan marketing which made the brand famous, and housewives were both buyers and sellers of the product with juicy commissions.. At 51, during a spectacular midlife crisis and with Tupperware at the top, he fired top executives, divorced, sold the company for around 150 million euros at current exchange rates, and bought an island in Central America. This was in 1958, ten years before the launch of the brand in Spain. Tupper continued to invent products until his death in 1983, but none came to fruition. He died in Costa Rica, renounced his American citizenship, with a bunch of failed petty patents in his name, and convinced that one day aliens would invade Earth and judge us for our work ethic.
By then, the company was operating in a hundred countries, retaining the direct sales model but with hired salespeople who replaced the original housewives. The rest you can imagine: the Internet. The digital sale ended up destroying the company, which had to withdraw from several markets such as the UK. For when they had the idea to turn into a store Online, as early as 2020 it may be too late. Last November, his managers announced that financial troubles portend a difficult year, a good euphemism for what we saw in April when they lost half their value in a single day in the stock market when they first warned of the possibility of bankruptcy.
On July 19, its shares were worth $0.64, which is more or less stable in previous weeks. Retail investors stepped in that day. In several batches, while the financial media was guessing the same as in 2021 (“What’s going on?”) And despite the fact that the company had already warned that bankruptcy would come before the end of the summer, the share rose to $5.38, by 840 % above its value on July 19. But can this profitable prank save the company? At the moment this is unbelievable. Despite its growth in value and perhaps permanence in the stock market, Tupperware still faces debts up to five times its current value. The only thing that is not currently in danger is its entry into the dictionary.