ABX’s top execs invest in company stock

Numerous senior officials at the Wilmington air-cargo company and its parent are putting their money where their jobs are.

One indication of its prospects, perhaps, is that numerous senior officials at the Wilmington air-cargo company and its parent are putting their money where their jobs are.
Three top executives and five of six nonexecutive members of its board have made open-market purchases of more than 400,000 shares of Air Transport Services Group Inc., ABX Air’s parent, over the past two months. The shares were cheap, but they were spending real money – presumably their own – not exercising options or other such instruments.
The flurry of stock purchases follows a plunge in the company’s market value and business prospects over 18 months. Its share price has fallen from more than $8 in July 2007, following a takeover overture, to as low as 12 cents this past November. Shares have been trading for about 30 cents recently.
Major catalysts have been ABX Air’s uncertain relationship with DHL and that company’s decision in November to pull out of the domestic U.S. market for package deliveries. ABX has derived the bulk of its revenue and profits from contracts with DHL under which it provided DHL with air-cargo and package-sorting services in the United States. Those operations have been centered at the Wilmington Air Park, which DHL owns and at which Air Transport Services Group maintains its headquarters.
Joe Hete, CEO of Air Transport Services Group, has said the company intends to sell back to DHL some of the aircraft ABX Air uses for DHL service. It will apply the proceeds to convert the Boeing 767 aircraft it retains – adding larger doors to accommodate larger containers – and deploy them and other aircraft under leases or through service arrangements with other customers.
Hete is one executive who has been buying stock. Others: Quint Turner, CFO; John Graber, president of the ABX Air subsidiary; and James Carey, chairman and a former director of Airborne Inc. The eight officials who reported purchases in Securities and Exchange Commission filings spent roughly $82,000 since mid-November.