PrefBlog

BCE Inc. has announced:

that 1,953,385 of its 11,500,000 fixed-rate Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series AM (Series AM Preferred Shares) have been tendered for conversion on March 31, 2016, on a one-for-one basis, into floating-rate Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series AN (Series AN Preferred Shares). Consequently, BCE will issue 1,953,385 new Series AN Preferred Shares on March 31, 2016.

The remaining Series AM Preferred Shares will continue to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol BCE.PR.M. The Series AM Preferred Shares will pay on a quarterly basis, for the five-year period beginning on March 31, 2016, as and when declared by the Board of Directors of BCE, a fixed quarterly cash dividend based on an annual dividend rate of 2.764%.

The Series AN Preferred Shares will pay for each quarterly period beginning with the quarterly period from and including March 31, 2016 up to but excluding June 30, 2016, as and when declared by the Board of Directors of BCE, a quarterly floating cash dividend based on the T-Bill Rate for such quarterly period plus 2.09%, calculated in accordance with the articles of BCE. The floating dividend rate applicable to the Series AN Preferred Shares for the quarterly period beginning on March 31, 2016 is 0.63625% (annual rate of 2.552% based on an initial T-Bill Rate of 0.462%). The Series AN Preferred Shares will be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol BCE.PR.N and will start trading at the opening of the market on March 31, 2016.

Assiduous Readers will remember that BCE.PR.M will reset to 2.764%, while the FloatingReset issue, BCE.PR.N, will pay 3-Month T-Bills + 209bp, reset quarterly. I recommended against conversion.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2016 at 1:17 am and is filed under Issue Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.