Casino - Comment

Casino completed its refinancing raising an additional €425m of senior debt at € +4%, and with €105m of the proceeds purchased c.€50m of 2023 and 2024 bonds. The result of the transaction is Casino now has c.€660m of cash held in segregated cash which will cover the upcoming 2022 and 2023 maturities. Therefore, Casino has no upcoming maturities until the Quatrim Jan 2024 bonds, which are currently secured and callable, and subsequently the March 2024 bonds. This reconfirms our base case that Casino do not sell any of their non-core assets and coupled with the Rallye Sauveguarde extension, there is no time pressure for Casino to deleverage.

It should be noted this transaction has increased the “secured” portion of Casino’s balance sheet. Secured leverage has increased from 2.64x reported in September 2021 to 3.14x Pro-forma. This is still inside the 3.5x covenant level, but we had expected Casino to refinance at unsecured level to leave additional headroom in order to finance Cnova's expansion on a secured basis.

Next steps for Casino are likely to include financing the growth plans at Cnova and refinancing Quatrim bonds. Casino plays down the time-critical nature of the Cnova funding stating the €300m is not required until H2 22.