Thomas Cook, Dia, Takko, Astaldi
All,CSome more notes:
- Thomas Cook: A January research note from Bernstein has apparently been surfacing, according to which in the first week of January - main holiday booking week - Internet searches for “Thomas Cook” fell -17.4% vs +4.7% and +12.5% for competitors “Tui” and “Jet2" respectively. Clearly that data carries at leat two disturbing messages: 1) As we are looking forward to only limited data from the company at this time of the year, bookings will be key and such a large negative number of internet searches will have been hard to compensate. 2) clearly we are all concerned about Brexit, but Jet2’s performance suggests it stole a march on TC. On the call we would like to know how far the RCF is drawn currently (as of Feb 7th 9am). There seems to be little chance of great outperformance on Thursday and management seem unlikely to have the depth of data at hand do appease the market.
- Dia: Received a “voluntary" bid from shareholder L1 including E500m of capital increase. Bonds were up some 15 points (as far as we have seen), but did not trade to par. War has broken out. With the bid the shareholder L1 is effectively moving against the plans of the company which had agreed a refinancing based on a E600m rights issue underwritten by Morgan Stanley (CPs not known). L1’s bid carries only E500m of capital increase and is not coordinated with the banks - yet. Shareholders have 20 days to make up their mind, which could present L1 with the majority of shares by the time of the next AGM instead of having to pay E200m to maintain its 29%. If the banks don’t approve - unlikely we think - then Dia needs to be refinanced by May. Hence the bond’s reluctance to trade straight to par. Tomas was on the call yesterday and is looking into it to see if they are worth picking up here. Given the fight for the equity beneath, it would seem so.
- Takko: There are rumours that the company has been meeting with investors. This appears entirely normal, given the change in CEO. But since today was interest payday and given the tight liquidity and abysmal backdrop of negative YoY TW-Testclub growth in Dec and Jan - not to mention mono label - people are rightly getting nervous. We have been short the 5.3/8s from 76c/E as of recently.
- Astaldi: The judge is expected to appoint a bondholder representative tomorrow ahead of the anticipated restructuring plan next week.
Chart of the day: How is this going to return to balance and what does it mean for passive investors?
