The shopping malls aren’t the only places offering big discounts this month. Anheuser-Busch InBev announced this morning that it will go ahead with a shareholder rights offering, a key part of its plan for financing last week’s purchase of Anheuser-Busch.

Here’s the shocking figure: New shares are being sold to current investors at 6.45 euros apiece, which is 69 percent below last week’s closing price. Companies typically offer a discount in such situations, so existing shareholders have an incentive to buy more shares. But 69 percent is a big, almost desperate-looking, haircut.

A-B InBev shares fell 20 percent in today’s trading, closing at 16.5 euros. Expect an even lower stock price tomorrow, when the shares start trading without the rights. (The right to buy a deeply discounted share is, obviously, valuable by itself.)

The former InBev shares are down 70 percent so far this year. InBev postponed the rights offering last month, when the shares were trading at 33.97 euros, saying it wanted to wait for better market conditions.

Obviously, things haven’t gotten better. Analyst Kristof Degraeve at SG Private Banking Belgium, told Reuters today:

The group said it would wait until financial markets had stabilized before launching the rights issue. I don’t think we can now say that financial markets have stabilized.

For A-B employees in St. Louis, the good news is that at least this piece of the financing is now in place. If the company had been somehow unable to replace its bridge loans, the cost could have been crippling.