Moody’s downgrades Novasep to Caa2 outlook negative
“Hold” the NOVASP 9.625% at a mid price of 59 or a Z-spread of 1,997 bps
Novasep will report FY 2010 results tomorrow. The company already provided guidance for revenues of above EUR 300 mn and an adjusted EBITDA of around EUR 55 mn, capex of EUR 15-16 mn and a cash position of EUR 40 mn. Given the very challenging market environment we expect a slight miss and estimate an EBITDA of around EUR 52 mn and a net leverage of around 7x. More importantly, we expect some colour on the recently announced potential financial restructuring of the company. At this stage, we are not sure whether Novasep’s current debt load is sustainable and believe the company is indeed well advised to look for strategic alternatives as it appears that Novasep is unable to halt the slide in its EBITDA. However, given the recent major contract extensions, visibility should improve. One short term fix would be a super senior facility provided by a special situations funds or its sponsor Gilde, yet this would not resolve Novasep’s fundamental issues, including a too high leverage. Therefore, we believe a more reasonable approach would be an equity injection and/or a debt exchange in which note holders would have to partially write down their engagement. While Gilde has been supportive so far, it is questionable whether it will inject further equity without asking for some concessions from bond holders. Nevertheless we view the fact that only very limited debt ranks ahead of bondholders (EUR 31.3 mn of finance leases) as favourable. In our view, a distressed EV to EBITDA for Novasep should be at around 5x-5.5x, well below current leverage. While the yield on its bonds appears tempting, we do not recommend to get engaged at this stage as a risk of a debt write-down and the long term operational challenges remain. We will reassess our recommendation after tomorrow’s conference call and keep our “Very High Risk” on the LARA scale for now.