Tag: PGF

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).

Pengrowth Energy’s debentures (TSX: PGF.DB.B) will be redeemed on March 31, 2017 and the company has also announced it will be redeeming USD$300 million in senior debt (announced February 21, 2017).

I own the convertible debentures and will miss their presence once they mature. I’m probably one of the few people that invested in the company and actually made money.

They also announced their year-end results on February 28, 2017. The operations of the company are fairly simple to understand – they are losing a relatively small amount of cash in the existing oil price environment, which they assume is at WTIC US$55/barrel and a 0.74 CAD/USD rate. Management has made some good decision-making on their oil hedges, but they have now closed them (for cold hard cash) and are completely at the whim of the oil commodity markets.

If you take their 2017 guidance to heart, you will end up with $195 million in “funds flow through operations”, a non-GAAP metric that is a proxy for operating cash flow excluding the impact of financing expenses and remediation. The GAAP statements are a mess to read because of derivative accounting (for oil price hedges), exchange rate adjustments, and require some mental massaging to be read properly.

All things considered, the corporation is not in terrible shape.

This is, however, except for the debt maturities coming up which need refinancing.

The company did have a $1 billion credit facility at the end of 2016. It was untapped, probably because the credit facility has a covenant similar to the senior debt. I believe the original intention of management was to use the credit facility to pay off the senior debt as it became due.

The corporation pre-announced in Q2-2016 that if oil prices continued their relatively low level, that they would be potentially in breach of their covenants. What was new in the Q4 announcement was that they alleviated their senior debt (before working capital) to book capitalization ratio covenant, at the expense of amending the debt agreement to redeem senior debt in the event of asset sales and also to reduce the ceiling of their credit facility to $750 million.

There are three other covenants remaining that an investor needs to pay attention to. The most material of them is the senior debt before working capital to adjusted EBITDA ratio, which ended at 3.1 in 2016, but needs to be below 3.5.

Pengrowth, to its credit, walked investors through their covenant calculations (page 10 of their MD&A). Doing some pro-forma (after debt repayment in the end of March) analysis, we have about $1,250 million in debt for covenant purposes, which means adjusted EBITDA needs to be above roughly $360 million for them to clear the mark. They did $581.6 million adjusted EBITDA in fiscal 2016, which gives them a relatively healthy margin of error – even though guidance is taking their production down about 10% for the year despite $120 million in projected capital expenditures.

So as long as oil prices don’t crash, they’ll probably use the credit facility to pay off the remaining US$100 million in debt due in July 26, 2017. The next major maturity is CAD$15 million + US$265 million on August 21, 2018, and if nothing changes between now and then, they will use the credit facility to pay that off. At that point, they will have about CAD$500 million utilized in their facility, plus the (presumably negative) amount of cash flow they burn through operations in the next couple years.

If oil does slip, there is a point where they will get into covenant trouble.

They did note in the MD&A:

After the above debt repayments, Pengrowth anticipates it will remain in compliance with its covenants through the end of 2018. In order to comply with certain financial covenants in its senior unsecured notes and term credit facilities through 2017 and 2018, Pengrowth has run a scenario, that accesses the capital markets before the end of 2017, and includes an improvement in realizations for oil and natural gas.

They will probably tap the asset market to give them a higher degree of comfort. This is what Penn West did when they gave up their Saskatchewan operations to stabilize their balance sheet.

In retrospect, I think the company erred in not using shares to repay the convertible debentures – they probably should have bit the bullet and increased their margin of safety by cheaply equitizing the convertible debt. Now, management is basically gambling that oil will be going up in the next couple of years and are basically playing a waiting game.