Case Summary
- 02:51
Pulling all the analysis together to understand Smithy's credit worthiness as a borrower
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Transcript
Okay, let's summarize this case now, and look at some of the arguments to accept the loan, or take it further in the organization at least, and some of the arguments to reject the loan, and leave it be on the accept side. While we have a conservative balance sheet, it is an asset intensive business, but still a conservative balance sheet. The liquidity is super strong, so certainly no issue there. The company's got a good global presence, and a global customer base. It's got a conservative management that's doing things to save costs, and above all, perhaps the debt to EBITDA ratios shows that there is a significant debt capacity under the current EBITDA levels. Remember, debt EBITDA is a very common measure to look at indebtedness in the markets. What are the reject arguments? First of all, there's anemic sales growth here. The company is somewhat stagnant. Secondly, there's really high refinancing, or repayment risk here, due to the weak cash flows. And cash flows are not just weak. They seem to be falling as well, in the projection period. They're high fixed charges, and therefore the company is sensitive to rising interest rates, if they take on this much debt. There are many competitors in this mature to in decline industry, and the company's relatively small, which means that they are sensitive to a big downturn, that could send them into bankruptcy. As a pure credit, I would probably lean towards the reject side here, and I think that is relatively well supported by the data. Okay, however, if we then choose to take this further inside the organization, take it to the credit committee, et cetera, what would we have to think about? First off, we would probably think of the structure of the loan. Are we going to do a term loan? A, term loan B, is the loan going to be amortizing, et cetera, and where in the corporate structure would the loan sit? We would also have to consider the pricing and the fees. We would think about other businesses that we have with Smithy. Is there important relationships here, that we need to maintain? Are we making money from Smithy in other ways? We might also think about how to syndicate this loan.
Next step, we would probably think about covenants. We would address areas of weakness or concern, and try to address those, then, in the written covenants, in the loans.
And finally, of course, as always, we would have to consider the collateral.