Pengrowth executes an asset sale

Pengrowth Energy (TSX: PGF) managed to execute an asset sale on its conventional production property north of Edmonton, the Swan Hills assets for CAD$180 million.

The debt profile at December 31, 2016 looked like this:

Right now the CAD/USD ratio is 0.75.

At the end of December 31, 2016 they also had CAD$287 million cash in the bank, plus another CAD$250 million for the 4% gross royalty sale on their Lindbergh asset.

They will be redeeming CAD$126.5 million in convertible debentures on March 31, 2017. They also have redeemed US$300 million of their 2017 debt maturity, and will redeem the rest after this transaction concludes at the end of May.

The company announced that after this sale, they have a pro-forma net debt of CAD$970 million.

My math suggests that after the 2017 redemption, they would have CAD$57 million cash left, assuming their operations consume zero cash (not a correct assumption!).

Payment of the debt will result in an interest expense decrease of $42 million per year.

They still need to have CAD$368 million on-hand on August 2018 in order to pay off their next debt maturity. It is possible they will run into covenant issues given that oil hasn’t moved around the US$50/barrel mark – their existing senior debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio would be the most material of it. They have about CAD$1.02 billion outstanding and their EBITDA needs to be above CAD$290 million in order to clear this hurdle.

Although the EBITDA value for covenant purposes was CAD$582 million, this is a skewed figure due to the employment of hedging. People not versed in accounting procedures for commodity hedging will have a tough time figuring out the mess, but I will just point out that management closed out their hedges in 2016 (which had been a VERY profitable transaction to them that otherwise would have guaranteed CCAA had they not had the foresight to doing so when times were much better).