It’s a Ninth Reverse Stock Split For This Serial Splitter

Bollinger said in August it sold $1 million of electric trucks. (Courtesy Bollinger Motors)

Key Points

About This Summary

• Bollinger Innovations, an EV seller, will reverse-split its stock again to avoid Nasdaq delisting after trading below $1.
• Bollinger will exchange one share for 250 on Sept. 22; it’s the ninth reverse split since 2022 and fifth this year.
• Bollinger said it won’t reverse split again for three years; reverse splits have nearly doubled despite new Nasdaq rules.

Bollinger Innovations, a struggling electric vehicle seller, is reverse-splitting its stock yet again.

Bollinger was featured in a recent Barron’s piece on the swelling number of firms doing reverse stock splits to lift their stocks above the $1 price needed to stay listed on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange. It will be the company’s ninth reverse split since 2022, and its fifth this year.

Bollinger will exchange its stock one share for 250 shares on Sept. 22, meaning that 250 Bollinger shares will combine into one share of stock. The split’s intended effect is to prevent a Nasdaq delisting process that would begin after a stock trades below $1 for 30 consecutive business days. Bollinger’s price on Thursday was $0.054 and has been below $1 for 24 business days.

Investors might not care about low-price stocks like Bollinger, but they have become numerous among listed stocks. Amid the rise of trading by retail investors, they have accounted for as much as 30% of volume on some days.

With trading in individual low-price stocks reaching millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of shares a day, these small stocks can enrich insiders and the company’s financiers, while outside shareholders suffer losses from dilutive financings and stock price declines.

Bollinger didn’t immediately respond to our queries. Nasdaq declined to comment.

In August, Bollinger said it sold $1 million of electric trucks. While running up an accumulated deficit of $2.6 billion, it has awarded over $94 million in cash and stock to its CEO David Michery, and registered over $1 billion in stock for financiers Michael Wachs and Terren Peizer, who are convicted felons. Meanwhile, since 2022, the compound effect of Bollinger’s repeated reverse splits has shrunk the value of an investor’s share by more than a quadrillion-fold.

Wachs and Peizer have not responded to repeated requests for comment.

Bollinger is far from alone in repeatedly splitting its stock to avoid delisting. In 2021, there were 31 reverse splits on Nasdaq, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. In 2024, there were 464.

To temper this trend, Nasdaq and the NYSE tightened their rules on reverse splits this year.

It hasn’t worked. Responding to a new Nasdaq rule requiring shareholder approval for reverse splits, companies like Bollinger have just held more frequent votes. Reverse stock splits have nearly doubled since the new rules—to 546 through August, compared with 284 in the same stretch last year.

This month’s split will be Bollinger’s last for a while. In Thursday’s announcement, the company said it won’t reverse split again for another three years.

Write to Bill Alpert at william.alpert@barrons.com