BBD – Page 3 – Divestor

Bombardier vs. Boeing

Just like most (but not all) of the financial community, I was not expecting the USA trade panel to vote 4-0 in favour of Bombardier.

The immediate implication here is that Boeing, by its actions, has pushed Bombardier into Airbus’ arms, and Airbus is obviously more capitalized and equipped to handle Boeing. By forcing the trade issue, they’ve allowed Airbus to take control of a superior product, which Airbus has a strategic interest in proliferating.

Suffice to say, Bombardier’s stock price is up today, but more relevant for myself, I will be holding onto their preferred shares.

Bombardier ran out of money

There is no way to explain Bombardier selling out a 50.01% stake of its C-series jet (leaving it with a minority 31% stake, with the Government of Quebec with a 19% interest) to Airbus for zero other than the simple fact that they ran out of money. They couldn’t keep things going for a few more years while all of the trade dispute issues played out.

With airbus fully incentivized to starting marketing the C-Series (and acquiring most of any industrial secrets contained within the aircraft design), they will be better positioned than Bombardier was with respect to the upcoming Boeing trade dispute (which will be a multi-year bloody battle, especially since Boeing has the full support of the US Government). One question internally for Airbus is how they will reconcile selling Airbus 319’s instead of CS300’s with this arrangement. Or are they just doing this to shut down the aircraft entirely?

The key paragraph is:

At closing, there will be no cash contribution by any of the partners, nor will CSALP assume any financial debt. It also contemplates that Bombardier will continue with its current funding plan of CSALP and will fund, if required, the cash shortfalls of CSALP during the first year following the closing up to a maximum amount of US$350 million, and during the second and third years following the closing up to a maximum aggregate amount of US$350 million over both years, in consideration for non-voting participating shares of CSALP with cumulative annual dividends of 2%, with any excess shortfall during such periods to be shared proportionately amongst Class A shareholders.

So Bombardier’s downside is US$700 million over the next couple years.

Long term, assuming this isn’t an agreement by Airbus to effectively shut down the C-series program, this should bode well for the C-Series program, which should remain in Canada and will have a more powerful marketing partner, but this is a negative for any upside to Bombardier – the promise of a wildly profitable commercial jet program will have now shrunk down to a 31% stake.

If I was going to use an analogy here, it is “Would you like 31% of something, or 100% of nothing?”. Bombardier seems to have taken the first option.

Bombardier has plenty of other cash-positive business units (Transportation and smaller-scale aircraft) that will be bringing in cash flows, but most of the upside in the business (via the promise of significant C-Series jet revenues) is gone.

I continue to hold a much-diminished stake of BBD.PR.C and BBD.PR.D shares, of which I am tepid on valuation and still do not see any imminent (I added in this word a couple hours after making this post!) dividend risk despite this deal.

Bombardier Yield Curve and Preferred Shares

The yield curve of Bombardier continues to compress:

Despite all of the negative press concerning their trade war with Boeing for the C-Series jets, it appears that the credit market is thinking that the credit side of Bombardier is quite secure – offering less than 7% for 8-year money. The company can easily raise capital with its current yield curve.

The preferred shares have had some interesting action lately, and this is because of the repricing of the BBD.PR.D dividend – because of (from the company’s perspective) an ill-timed rapid increase of the 5-year Government of Canada yield curve, their BBD.PR.D series will be giving out 3.983% on a $25 par value of dividends. Around July 10th when the market was blissfully unaware of the dividend adjustment (as they apparently didn’t read press releases), this would have translated into a 10.8% eligible dividend yield.

It is because of this that the BBD.PR.C series has traded down – there is obvious arbitrage between the C-yields and the D-yields. They were originally trading a full 200 basis points away from each other but this has now converged to about 50 basis points which is more reasonable (BBD.PR.C is worth more if you plan on interest rates to decrease, while the D’s are better if you expect them to rise in 4.9 years).

In relation to Bombardier’s bond yield curve, the preferred shares looked extremely cheap (especially the BBD.PR.D series at 10.8% yield!). Now it is around 9.3%.

Disclosure: I own some BBD.PR.C and BBD.PR.D.

Bombardier credit market completely out of the woods now

Bombardier’s bonds have traded considerably higher since their latest 8.75% bond issue (maturing December 2021) which is now trading at a premium to par.

They have to be looking at this and thinking about securing further long-term funding. It also gives them a lot more negotiating power with the Canadian government, who wants to inject some more money into the corporation (whether they need it or not) for political reasons.

Floating rate preferred shares are yielding 8%, while the fixed rate is yielding 9% (quite the premium to pay for a floating rate). Given the difference between the bond market and the preferred share market, I still believe the preferred shares are trading slightly cheap to what they actually should be.

The equity is also receiving quite a bid as of late, despite the massive warrants overhang in their earlier year government fundings. If they receive another large order for C-Series aircraft (something slightly larger than Air Tanzania), it is quite likely the stock will rise even further.

Bombardier will get their money from the federal government

It is quite obvious that Bombardier will eventually get some equity infusion from the federal government, which will be the final signal to all market participants that Canada will not let the corporation fail, even if the C-Series turns out to be an economic disaster (it does not appear to be at the moment – the risk at this point is on execution).

The question is what type of concessions Bombardier will have to make, and I suspect the “win-win” agreement will be only dismantling the dual-class structure of stock if the company keeps less than X jobs outside of Canada (mainly in the Province of Quebec).

The Government of Quebec (and the Quebec Pension Plan) invested previously into Bombardier and received common shares and warrants for a half-stake in the C-Series jet and also a chunk of the Bombardier transportation division.

My whole line of thinking was that preferred shareholders and bondholders would be the primary beneficiary of all of this capital infusion. Currently, the Series 4 preferred shares (TSX: BBD.PR.C) is trading at a 9.4% yield, while the Series 2/3 (floating/fixed) shares are at 8.2% and 9.1%, respectively. The next rate reset will be in August of 2017.

The yield curve for debt is quite healthy for Bombardier and they’ll be in a good position to refinance maturities, especially when they receive another equity injection. Yields should continue to compress in this scenario.