Privately-owned Polish satellite broadcaster TVN has priced its E175m of senior unsecured notes due 15 November 2018. The notes, which pay interest semi-annually in May and November, priced at par to yield 7.875%. Nomura, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank acted…
Privately-owned Polish satellite broadcaster TVN has priced its E175m of senior unsecured notes due 15 November 2018. The notes, which pay interest semi-annually in May and November, priced at par to yield 7.875%. Nomura, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank acted as joint book-running managers for the issue.
Proceeds from the offering are to be used to fully prepay the existing PLN500m of senior unsecured notes maturing 2013 as well as to refinance existing credit facilities and bank guarantees.
John Driscoll, TVN Group CFO, commented: “The placement was more than five times oversubscribed, which we view as an endorsement by the market of TVN Group’s quality and strategy. The transaction is net debt neutral. The key motivation for us to issue these Senior Notes is to transform all of our financing into long-term capital market debt, now maturing from 2017 onwards.”
Moody’s assigned the debt a provisional (P)B1 rating, reflecting its unsecured position within TVN’s capital structure, as well as its pari passu ranking with TVN’s existing unsecured notes, due 2017. But the rating is also impacted by the acquisition of DTH satellite platform ‘n’, which increased TVN’s risk profile as the company is still in the early stages of development. Last April, TVN finalised its acquisition of the 49% stake in ‘n’ that it did not already own. To fund the E188m total transaction price, TVN issued E148m in seven-year 10.75% high yield senior unsecured notes and E40m in corporate promissory notes to ITI Media Group, the then owner of ‘n’, and its subsidiaries. The high yield notes have four-year non-call and rank pari passu with the E405m 10.75% senior notes, due 2017, that were issued by TVN in November 2009. The promissory notes, which have substantially the same terms and conditions as the high yield notes, have been put in an escrow account to be released subject to the satisfaction of certain conditions. In a separate report, TVN announced, a few months ago, that the estate of its founder, the late Jan Bohdan Wejchert, sold 6.4 million shares for PLN16.5 (US$5.73) per share, thereby raising PLN 105.6m (US$32m). The estate includes Aldona Wejchert, a member of the TVN supervisory board, and Jan Lukasz Wejchert, a member of the company’s management board. TVN is majority owned (56.45%) by the ITI Media Group, a Polish media conglomerate.
