Image Credit: Katie Musial, Late Apex Partners

Broomfield, Colorado — The skiing community was abuzz yesterday after a letter was sent to Vail Resorts.

Late Apex Partners, LLC alleges that it’s a shareholder of Vail Resorts, and it thinks that the Colorado company is being poorly run. In a letter and presentation sent to the company that was shared to the media, Late Apex Partners calls for the firing of CEO Kirsten Lynch and CFO Angela Korch, a resetting of the board that includes canning of the current Executive Chairperson (and former CEO) Rob Katz, cutting the dividends, hiring a CEO with a proven track record, and grow partnerships on the Epic Pass without mergers and acquisitions.

My first thoughts after seeing this was that this was a thorough dismantling of the company, and the investor made some valid points, especially regarding their excessive dividends, which could be going towards installing new lifts at Mount Sunapee. Then I wondered: “Who the heck is Late Apex Partners?”

The presentation states that its run by Taylor G. Schmidt, and claims that he has operational experience with Cadence, Kraft Heinz, and the VF Corporation. However, the LLC was only founded last year, so if they do have stock, it’s likely only a small shareholder for Vail Resorts. There are much bigger shareholders out there for Vail Resorts, as easily found on Vail Resorts’ Yahoo Finance page. If the Baron Growth Fund or BAMCO Inc. wrote this letter, who both own millions of shares, my opinion would be vastly different.

When you search up Late Apex Partners’ website on Google, you get this:

It’s…. a website. I’ll give them that.

The presentation was clearly intended to make some noise, and it did just that. Popular financial news sources like the Wall Street Journal and Seeking Alpha shared the letter, among other news outlets. Skiing meme pages also shared it, and the letter also made the rounds on Reddit. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have posted about this if the letter hadn’t received such widespread coverage. Since it has become viral though, I felt like it’s something to share based on the need for it to be scrutinized.

Vail Resorts has made some errors this year, but it seems unlikely that a letter from a LLC that was just created last year is going to cause an existential crisis for them.

Image Credits: Katie Musial, Late Apex Partners, Vail Resorts

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Have any post ideas or corrections? Reach out to me: ian@unofficialnetworks.com.