Courtesy of Mish.
With central bankers globally suppressing interest rates, the such for yield elsewhere is on. One of the places investors have turned is speculative junk bond offerings.
Please consider French Company Does Biggest Junk Bond Sale Ever.
Numericable (NUM), which provides cable and internet service in France and other European markets, sold a record amount of high-yield bonds Wednesday with some priced in dollars and others in euros.
It’s sold $7.78 billion and €2.25 billion in notes that yield 5% or more, according to a statement from Altice, the multinational telecom group that owns Numericable. Altice issued $2.9 billion and €2.1 billion in bonds that yield more than 7%.
Numericable will use the proceeds to finance its acquisition of rival cable company SFR.
Overall, the deal represents the largest sale of high-yield debt on record, according to Dealogic. It surpassed Sprint’s $6.5 billion debt sale in September.
Dollar Equivalent Junk
All told Attice issued 10.68 billion in dollar denominated bonds and 4.35 billion in euro denominated bonds. The grand total in dollar equivalent junk is an amazing $16.69 billion.
Bidding Wars for Junk
$10.89 billion of that went to buy out a rival company at an undoubtedly absurd price due to bidding wars.
The New York Times has some bidding war info in Numericable Raises $10.9 Billion in Junk Bond Offering.
The battle for SFR pitted two French billionaires against each other: Martin Bouygues, who runs the diversified industrial group that bears his name, and the French entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, who since 2002 has built Altice into a global operation with cable and cellphone assets in Europe and the Caribbean.
Bruno Lasserre, the president of the Autorité de la Concurrence, has said that the French competition watchdog would conduct a “thorough review” of the Numericable-SFR combination, but that review is not expected to preclude the deal.
…
