Monday, March 07, 2011

L3 Debt Costs More

Level3 re-financed $500M worth of senior notes in private placement paying 9.735% yield on maturity in 4/2019. WOW! New debt costs a lot today. Telcos are going from paying 3-5% for debt to 7-10% while prices dip and competition increases. About $6.6B in debt and less than $4B in revenue. BTW, the CDN business is about $160M in revenue per year even with clients like Apple and Netflix. Also, when asked during the 4Q2010 finance call about if they will become a Cloud provider, both CEO and COO said No. That they are backing the strategy they decided in 2004 of being the bandwidth provider to Cloud companies just like they have been the bandwidth provider to content companies.

So not everyone has to be in the Cloud. There is money to be made providing last mile; middle mile; and first mile (bandwidth to the data centers, content and cloud companies) - if you own the network.

PS

Windstream sold $600 million of senior notes in the 144a private placement market yielding 7.5% in April 2023. (If you can't tell, I don't grasp the financial world much. It truly amazes me the randomness of it all.)

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