It appears nearly $1B may not be enough to keep Toys R Us from disappearing off the U.S. map.
The toy retailer has rejected an $890M bid from Isaac Larian, the CEO of toymaker MGA Entertainment, to acquire and keep open several hundred stores in the U.S. and Canada, the Wall Street Journal reports. An anonymous source told the Journal that the bid failed to meet the qualified bid threshold under the bankruptcy court procedures.
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Though Toys R Us is liquidating stock at all 735 of its stores in America, with plans to close them all by summer, it is still auctioning its Canadian stores for sale with an option to add the best-performing 200 stores in the U.S., according to the WSJ. Auction proceedings will reportedly resume on April 19, with multiple bids having been entered. Whether or not any qualified bids would keep stores open has yet to be disclosed.
Larian, whose company relies on Toys R Us for 20% of its sales, told the Journal that he had not been notified of his bid's rejection.
"If that's the case, it’s really a shame that they’re going to let this company go into liquidation instead of at least responding and saying we need more or we need this," he said.
The MGA CEO also told Retail Dive that he expects to remain involved in the auction process in some way, and that he believes the bid he submitted was "a fair valuation of the company's U.S. assets in an effort to save the business and over 130,000 domestic jobs."
The next auction date for the Canadian portion of Toys R Us bankruptcy filings is set for April 23.
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