A Guide to the European Loan Market
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
LEVERagED COMMENtaRY & Data A GUIDE TO THE EUROPEAN LOAN MARKET FEBRUARY 2012 LEVERagED COMMENtaRY & Data A GUIDE TO THE EUROPEAN LOAN MARKET FEBRUARY 2012 WWW.LCDCOMPS.COM Copyright © 2012 by Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC. All rights reserved. No content (including ratings, credit-related analyses and data, model, software, or other application or output therefrom) or any part thereof (Content) may be modified, reverse engineered, reproduced, or distributed in any form by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC or its affiliates (collectively, S&P). The Content shall not be used for any unlawful or unauthorized purposes. S&P and any third-party providers, as well as their directors, officers, shareholders, employees, or agents (collectively S&P Parties) do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or availability of the Content. S&P Parties are not responsible for any errors or omissions (negligent or otherwise), regardless of the cause, for the results obtained from the use of the Content, or for the security or maintenance of any data input by the user. The Content is provided on an “as is” basis. S&P PARTIES DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR USE, FREEDOM FROM BUGS, SOFTWARE ERRORS OR DEFECTS, THAT THE CONTENT’S FUNCTIONING WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, OR THAT THE CONTENT WILL OPERATE WITH ANY SOFTWARE OR HARDWARE CONFIGURATION. In no event shall S&P Parties be liable to any party for any direct, indirect, incidental, exemplary, compensatory, punitive, special or consequential damages, costs, expenses, legal fees, or losses (including, without limitation, lost income or lost profits and opportunity costs or losses caused by negligence) in connection with any use of the Content even if advised of the possibility of such damages. Credit-related and other analyses, including ratings, and statements in the Content are statements of opinion as of the date they are expressed and not statements of fact. S&P’s opinions, analyses, and rating acknowledgment decisions (described below) are not recommendations to purchase, hold, or sell any securities or to make any investment decisions, and do not address the suitability of any security. S&P assumes no obligation to update the Content following publication in any form or format. The Content should not be relied on and is not a substitute for the skill, judgment, and experience of the user, its management, employees, advisors, and/or clients when making investment and other business decisions. S&P does not act as a fiduciary or an investment advisor except where registered as such. While S&P has obtained information from sources it believes to be reliable, S&P does not perform an audit and undertakes no duty of due diligence or independent verification of any information it receives. To the extent that regulatory authorities allow a rating agency to acknowledge in one jurisdiction a rating issued in another jurisdiction for certain regulatory purposes, S&P reserves the right to assign, withdraw, or suspend such acknowledgement at any time and in its sole discretion. S&P Parties disclaim any duty whatsoever arising out of the assignment, withdrawal, or suspension of an acknowledgment as well as any liability for any damage alleged to have been suffered on account thereof. S&P keeps certain activities of its business units separate from each other in order to preserve the independence and objectivity of their respective activities. As a result, certain business units of S&P may have information that is not available to other S&P business units. S&P has established policies and procedures to maintain the confidentiality of certain nonpublic information received in connection with each analytical process. S&P may receive compensation for its ratings and certain analyses, normally from issuers or underwriters of securities or from obligors. S&P reserves the right to disseminate its opinions and analyses. S&P’s public ratings and analyses are made available on its Web sites, www.standardandpoors.com (free of charge), and www.ratingsdirect.com and www. globalcreditportal.com (subscription), and may be distributed through other means, including via S&P publications and third- party redistributors. Additional information about our ratings fees is available at www.standardandpoors.com/usratingsfees. 2 LEVERAGED COMMENTARY & DATA FEBRUARY 2012 WWW.SPCAPItalIQ.COM TO OUR CLIENTS his sixth edition of Leveraged Commentary & Data - A Guide To The European Loan Market Tcovers a gamut of topics on the European leveraged loan market, including secondary trad- ing, default, restructurings, and recovery. In addition, as usual, we have also updated and amended our primer on the European leveraged loan market. In 2011, leveraged loans had a year of two halves: a strong first half of the year followed by a weaker second half on the back of the fallout from the European sovereign risk contagion. The European high-yield market as well as the broader capital markets were also shut in the second half of 2011 as investors decided to “de-risk.” The absence of the high-yield market in particular hurt the loan market, as the high-yield market was the main driver of repayments to loans. However, 2011 is different from 2008, which saw waves of forced selling in the secondary mar- ket. Nonetheless, some arrangers were left with a significant primary overhang of loans, some of which was sold down. This overhang, along with the end of European CLO reinvestment peri- ods, general weak economic-activity, and the implementation of Basel III and the capital requirements regulation (CRD IV), will make 2012 a challenging one for investors and issuers. We expect 2012 to be a more challenging year for corporate credit quality in Europe as euro- zone sovereigns continue their struggle to reconcile the twin problems of reducing debt while supporting growth against the background of growing political discord. Stronger corporates typically capitalized on the 2009-2011 economic rebound to strengthen their balance sheets and liquidity and are reasonably well placed to weather the mild recession that we now envisage for Europe in the early part of 2012. Nonetheless, we believe that we are entering a period where corporate credit performance will become far more sensitive to the strength and weight of the domestic (“local”) market in generating earnings given the volatile and uncertain economic out- look in the EU. This means that more “local” companies with a high dependency on depressed demand conditions in EU austerity countries will be most exposed, irrespective of the perceived cyclicality of the sector in which the company operates. In our view, the escalation of the eurozone sovereign crisis will herald a renewed step-up in corporate defaults over the next couple of years for at least three reasons. First, and most obvi- ously, business prospects in Europe have taken a turn for the worse, with at least a shallow recession now in prospect for the first half of 2012. Second, the gradual improvement seen in the availability of debt financing since the summer of 2009 has hit a brick wall. Thirdly, and somewhat related to the second factor in our view, is that the policy of forbearance by senior lenders is reaching its limits given the proximity to principle maturity dates in 2013-2014. If you want to learn more about our loan market services, all the appropriate contact information is listed in the back of this publication. We welcome questions, suggestions, and feedback on our products and services, and on this Guide. You can access this report and other relevant articles on LCD’s website, www.lcdcomps.com, and current loan, high-yield, including selected Standard & Poor’s recovery reports and analyses and a comprehensive list of Standard & Poor’s bank loan and recovery ratings at www.sandprecoveryratings.com. Sucheet Gupte Paul Drake A GUIDE TO THE EUROPEAN LOAN MARKET FEBRUARY 2012 3 WWW.SPCAPItalIQ.COM CONTENTS A Primer For The European Syndicated Loan Market. 5 Glossary . 26. Boom And Bust Again In 2011 . .32 . Eurozone Risks Will Weigh On Corporates If They Can’t Find Growth Globally. 39 The Future Of Corporate Funding: Filling The Leveraged Loan Gap In Europe . 48. Why Refinancing Bank Debt With Bonds In Europe Lowers Recovery Expectations . .53 European Leveraged Loans Face Funding Hiatus As CLO Vehicles’ Support Wanes . 57 Key Contacts . 82 LEVERAGED COMMENTARY & DATA FEBRUARY 2012 4 WWW.SPCAPItalIQ.COM A Primer For The European Syndicated Loan Market Ruth McGavin orporate lending is a key route that European companies use to London (44) 20-7176-3924 Caccess the debt markets, combined with increasing issuance into [email protected] the high-yield bond market. Since the euro launched in 1999, the Marina Lukatsky New York syndicated loan market in particular has become the dominant way for (1) 212-438-2709 marina_lukatsky@ European issuers to tap banks and other institutional capital providers spcapitaliq.com for loans. A syndicated loan is one that is provided by plain-vanilla loan, typically an unsecured a group of lenders and is structured, revolving credit instrument that is used to arranged, and administered by one or sev- provide support for short-term commercial eral commercial or investment banks known paper borrowings or for working capital. In as arrangers. They are less expensive and many cases, moreover, these borrowers will more efficient to administer than traditional effectively syndicate a loan themselves, using bilateral, or individual, credit lines. the arranger simply to craft documents and At the most basic level, arrangers raise administer the process. For leveraged investor funds for an issuer in need of issuers, the story is a very different one for capital.