Media
Media
CMA CGM, which has been unable to complete negotiations with a consortium of lenders to restructure $7 billion in debt, is considering a public listing of its stock as part of a package of measures aimed at turning its finances around after it lost $1.42 billion in 2009, according to the Financial Times.
The Marseilles-based, company, which operates the third-largest container ship fleet, was unable on Tuesday to announce a badly needed restructuring package, amid disagreements over the Saade family’s continuing control of the company.
Rodolphe Saade, who is the carrier’s deputy chief executive and the son of founder and non-executive chairman Jacques Saade, told the Financial Times his father had decided to pursue an IPO after the successful conclusion of a restructuring.
“Our objective is to find investors and eventually, in a couple of years from now, go public,” he said. Any IPO would be structured to ensure the family, who arrived in France as refugees from Lebanon’s civil war in 1978, retained control, Saade said.
CMA CGM has been in discussions with its creditors since September on a potential deal to restructure the line’s financial obligations to lenders and shipyards after the worst year in container shipping’s history threatened its future.
In December, the company announced a preliminary deal with its creditor banks under which Philippe Soulie, a veteran French businessman with a financial background but no shipping experience, took over in January as chief executive from Jacques Saade, the 72-year-old founder.
“He knows how to count. And we know how to run a shipping company, so together it’s only positive,” Rodolphe Saade told The Journal of Commerce in an interview in February.
The company has since missed deadlines to finalize an agreement, which it hoped to announce in April. The carrier received $80 million in new funding in February from a group of 75 creditor banks, to which it owes $7 billion, and expected to get the balance of the $500 million it had been promised “within weeks,” Saade told The Journal of Commerce at that time. But the carrier has not announced any further funding since then.
A successful restructuring of CMA CGM’s debt is a precondition for lenders to finance CMA CGM’s orderbook of 30, mostly large container ships from Korean shipyards.
In January, Korea’s Hanjin Heavy Industries sold a new ship built for CMA CGM – the CMA CGM Kessel – to another owner after the company was unable to provide the cash to pay for it.
People involved in the restructuring discussions have indicated that several investors are determined that the family should lose control. Potential investors include Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and a consortium of Louis Dreyfus, the French shipowning company, and Goldman Sachs, the investment bank.
CMA CGM wants between $350 million and $500 million in fresh equity.
Saade told the Financial Times that investors are happy with the family’s retaining control. The two largest container shipping lines – Denmark’s Maersk Line, the market leader, and Mediterranean Shipping Company, the number two – are family controlled.
“Family companies run their businesses in a much better way than others,” Saade said.
In common with other lines, CMA CGM reported a strong start to the current year, with net profits for the first quarter of $270 million on revenue of $3.2 billion.
Source: http://www.joc.com
qq.com