Just-formed Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s biggest brewer, has resurrected a plan to issue new stock to pay off part of a $50 billion-plus debt load incurred to complete the merger of Anheuser-Busch and InBev.

A-B InBev will raise a little more than $8 billion by issuing as many as 986.1 million new shares to current investors, the Belgium-based maker of Stella Artois and Budweiser said today. Investors can subscribe for eight new shares for every five they already own, according to Bloomberg News.  (You can read the story here).

As stock values dropped worldwide last month, InBev delayed its stock offering plan, saying it would wait for stable markets. The implication was that it did not want to issue more stock than necessary. Issuing stock when a company’s stock is devalued dilutes the ownership stake of current shareholders — something the Brazilian and Belgian investors who control the company wanted to avoid. (you can read the Post-Dispatch’s coverage of the families here).

The timing still does not look stellar for InBev to issue stock. Its share price is down by about a third since Oct. 14, when it delayed its stock offering plan. InBev’s stock has been hammered this year because of concerns about the combined company’s massive debt load and slowing growth in emerging markets. The company’s stock dropped again on Monday, approaching levels not seen since March 2003, when the company was called Interbrew.  

But with investors willing to pony up the cash — and no guarantee that stock markets will improve next year – the company is apparently jumping through a window of opportunity. According to Bloomberg News:

A-B InBev’s controlling Brazilian executives and Belgian families will spend 2.8 billion euros on stock to keep their majority, more than double what they intended last month.

The stock sale “is the first stage in paying down the debt mountain,” Collins Stewart analyst Rob Mann said in a note quoted by Bloomberg. ”This situation remains relatively high-risk.”

One big incentive for the investors to ante up: They are getting a big discount. The stock offering is priced at a 69 percent discount to InBev’s closing price on Friday, according to Mark Swartzberg, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus.  “The attractive terms of the rights offering should allow the company to complete the deal, albeit at a high cost,” Gimme Credit analyst Craig Hutson wrote Monday.