Good morning. Thanks for joining this call as I really need your help with an urgent task. A client has approached our debt capital markets team about a potential bond issuance. I need analyst to run some analysis on the numbers and see if this bond issuance is feasible. Can you help me with this as a bit of context? The client is Charles River Laboratories, which runs drug development laboratories in the us. The company recently underwent a business restructuring and is now keen to invest in new laboratory facilities, and they want to finance the project with a $650 million five year bond. However, a key priority for the company is to maintain their current BB plus credit rating. Now, in my view, this would require them to maintain a debt to book equity ratio of below 75%, a net debt to ebitda, multiple of below two and a half times, and an EBITDA to interest expense ratio at least six times. In terms of your task for today, I need you to run some analysis to demonstrate whether the bond issuance and project would likely result in a breach of those ratios at any time during the period of the bond issuance. If there is a material risk, please can you consider any mitigations either in the analysis or by the company that would help avoid a breach of these criteria.

Ultimately, we want to help the company achieve their plans without triggering a credit downgrade. To help you with your analysis, I've set up an Excel file that you can use, which includes further details on the timing and amount of the project revenues and costs. I've also obtained the research departments company forecasts so that you can incorporate the project revenue and costs into these forecasts. The Excel file is available on our team's shared drive. Now, I expect this work to take you about an hour, so please drop me an email when it's ready for review. Thanks so much and I'll catch up with you later. Bye.