Finance History|11 Wall Street — Consumers Power Became a Holding Company Called CMS

People treat CMS Energy as a Jackson, Michigan, utility parent that always printed CMS.

The 1987 issuer was a wrap around Consumers Power Company after the Midland nuclear write-down.

Consumers Power shareholders approved a reorganization in May 1987. Each common share of the utility converted into one common share of a new Michigan parent, CMS Energy Corporation.

An NRC staff letter dated that spring recorded the effective date as 22 May 1987, when Consumers became a wholly owned subsidiary of the holding company incorporated on 26 February 1987.

No cash was raised. The public line that had been the operating utility became the parent ticker.

The American Public Power Association later listed the same 1987 reorganization among investor-owned utility holding companies formed that year.

FundingUniverse, drawing on contemporary accounts, said the new name was meant to separate unregulated generation and oil and gas from the Michigan franchise after charges of mismanagement around the abandoned Midland plant.

Consumers Power was rebranded Consumers Energy in 1997. The parent ticker stayed CMS on the New York Stock Exchange.

The mechanism is a share-for-share holding-company conversion. Rate-regulated wires and pipes sat in the subsidiary. Independent power and other books sat beside them under a new listed parent.

Holders who had owned the Michigan utility now owned the parent that owned it.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where the CMS line printed. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.