Sirius XM Catches S&P Upgrade (SIRI)
Sirius XM Radio Inc. (NASDAQ: SIRI) has caught a debt upgrade from Standard & Poor’s. The cited reasons were that the liquidity position has improved after debt refinancings, and also that its EBITDA is improving. Based on the new issue…
Based on the new issue of $250 million of senior secured notes, S&P has raised its corporate credit rating on the company to ‘B-‘ from ‘CCC+’ today. It was given a recovery rating of ‘1’ and its outlook is stable. Among other positive mentions were manageable near-term debt maturities, likely operating performance improvements, and cost savings.
S&P revised the recovery rating on Sirius XM’s senior unsecured and subordinated debt to ‘5’, indicating a modest expectation of 10% to 30% for a debtholder recovery in the event of a payment default. The issue-level rating was raised one notch on this debt to ‘CCC+’ from ‘CCC-‘ over an increased estimate of enterprise value.
S&P assigned the proposed $250 million senior secured notes due 2015 a rating of ‘B+’ and assigned the notes a recovery rating of ‘1’ over very high chances of 90% to 100% recovery for noteholders in the event of a payment default.
JON C. OGG
AUGUST 13, 2009
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
