Moody’s assigned yesterday a defintive B2 rating to a 300 million euros bond issued by N&W Global Vending spa, a leading Italian maker of automatich vending machines of snacls and hot and cold drinks which has been acquired by Lone Star private equity firm at the end of December 2015 (see here a previous post by BeBeez), MF Milano Finanza writes today.
Recently Standard&Poor’s too assigned a B rating to N&W’s bonds. The 300 million euros bond is a senior first-lien secured note maturing in October 2023, non callable for 3 years and paying a 7% coupon. The bond has been priced a a 7.277% yield a couple of weeks ago. N&W Global Vending also placed a 100 million euro second-lien bond which S&P’s rated CCC+ while Moody’s gave no rating.
Joint bookrunner were Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank (both also global coordinator), Banca Imi and Credit Agricole.
Moody’s report explains that the B2 rating is due to the limited size of the company which reached 300 million euros in revenues in 2015 (even if it also reached a rich 95 millione uros ebitda) and the high leverage as its net financial debt is about 6x its ebtida in the 12 months ending on June 30th. The company actually also has a 40 million euros revolving facility which has been assigned a B+ rating by Moody’s.
N&W Global Vending just merged with LSF9 Canto Investments spa, the newco through which Lone Star had adquired the company in a deal valuing N&W 670 million euros. Lone Star invested 262 millione uros in equity and was financed with a 400 million euros bridge loan. The latter has then been refinanced by the double bond issue.
Sellers to Lone Star were Equistone (ex Barclays Private Equity) and Investcorp, who had bought out the group in 2008 from other two private equity funds managed by Argan Capital and Merrill Lynch Private Equity. Those two funds in turn in 2005 had bought N&W from a fund managed by Compass Partners International, which had built up the group in 1999, after buying the Italian company Necta (ex Zanussi Vending) from Electrolux-Zanussi and having merged it with the danish company Wittenborg. N&W Global Vending is then at its fourth buyout round.
