With different businesses, different ways to tap funding in hard times
VIDEO | A comparative take on three corporations – NIBE Group, European Energy, and Falck, each represented by their treasurers – were topic for a full-room breakout session in the Thursday morning of the Treasury 360° conference. Their strategies to navigate the tougher debt market since the Covid crisis differ widely.
With a leverage of 6.6 times, European Energy runs by a high-yield strategy, currently including four outstanding bonds. Falck, in contrast, have so far decided “not to add the complexity” of bond issuance, but to stay with bank funding. NIBE, the only publicly listed group of the three, has four outstanding bonds too, while being the lowest-leveraged business of the three (at 0.9x). All three feature debt totals between 400 and 900 million euro.
Panellists were …
Tina Nguyen, Finance and Treasury, NIBE Group,
Flemming Jacobsen, Head of Group Treasury and FP&A, European Energy, and
Allan Kristoffersen, Head of Group Treasury, Falck,
under moderation by Nordea Managing Director Henrik Immelborn.
Introducing the session, Henrik Immelborn showed a graph of how unrated Nordic local currency bond issuance moved to consistently lower volume levels as the Covid 19 crisis hit at the beginning of 2020.
“It shows market access cannot be taken for granted,” he said, observing that a broader movement from loans to bonds seems to have been temporarily replaced by a movement in the opposite direction – from bonds to loans.
The session was named “Navigating a storm – How to ensure access to funding at a weather turn in the financial market”.
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