Stable Junk: Fitch Reaffirms Venezuela's PDVSA Credit Rating
Despite a late payment for its 2034 bond recently, Fitch Ratings reaffirmed Venezuelan oil company PDVSA's credit rating at CC on Wednesday.
Fitch noted the company's liquidity problem and said they believed it was mainly due to transfers to the central government and lower oil prices. PDVSA's problems are legion, but its use as a government ATM machine doesn't help matters. PDVSA's cash flow generation is always a symptom of its relationship with the central government. So far, the government is still showing a commitment to pay the company's lenders.
PDVSA's international long-term ratings of CC are one notch below Fitch's sovereign ratings for Venezuela of CCC. Fitch said in a press release this morning that it continues to expect PDVSA will receive financial aid from the Venezuelan government to make upcoming principal and interest payments. In October, PDVSA said it could be difficult to make scheduled payments on its existing debt, which heightened uncertainty as to PDVSA's liquidity and caused bond prices to fall last week when it missed a payment date.
Venezuela's central bank has only $11 billion in reserves as of October, of which a significant portion is in gold. PDVSA's cash on hand as of March 31, 2016 amounted was $5.5 billion, but that number is likely to be much different today. The Venezuelan government does not have foreign principal payments until 2018 and interest expenses average approximately $3 billion per year.
It is not easy to get updated information from the central bank, or from PDVSA, which is not publicly traded. The Venezuelan government is far from transparent about its use of PDVSA money, which poses challenges to accurately assessing its financial strength.
Fitch said that the CC rating suggests that default is still a possibility. If a default or debt restructuring occurs, Fitch anticipates average recovery for PDVSA's bondholders of 31%-50%, and likely closer to the lower end of the range in that case. Moreover, if oil prices do not recover following last week's production deal with OPEC and Russia, this could pause further risks to default in order for PDVSA to reduce payments and hand that money over to the government instead of to bond lords. This may also prove popular, at least rhetorically, for the government of left winger Nicolas Maduro.