PrefBlog

DBRS has announced that it:

has today removed Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. (BRP or the Company; formerly Brookfield Renewable Energy Partners L.P.) from Under Review with Developing Implications and confirmed the ratings as follows:

— Issuer Rating of BRP at BBB (high), Stable trend
— Class A Preferred Limited Partnership Units of BRP at Pfd-3 (high), Stable trend
— Class A Preference Shares of Brookfield Renewable Power Preferred Equity Inc. (guaranteed by BRP) at Pfd-3 (high), Stable trend
— Senior Unsecured Debentures and Notes of BRP Finance ULC (guaranteed by BRP) at BBB (high), Stable trend

On January 13, 2016, DBRS placed all the ratings as listed above Under Review with Developing Implications. The rating actions followed the announcement that the Company, with its institutional partners (together, the Consortium), committed to acquire a 57.6% controlling interest in ISAGEN S.A. E.S.P. (ISAGEN) for a total consideration of approximately $2.2 billion (the Acquisition).
…
DBRS has reviewed the Company’s final financing plan of the Acquisition and is of the view that the Company’s final financing plan is consistent with DBRS’s expectations. In support of the Acquisition, in May 2016, the Company closed CAD 200 million preferred unit offering (Class A Limited Partnership Units) and in June 2016, the Company completed CAD 860 million equity offering. The preferred shares were treated as equity since the outstanding amount still falls within DBRS’s 20% threshold of common equity. Based on DBRS’s review and pro forma calculations, the Company’s consolidated and deconsolidated metrics would remain supportive of the current rating as follows: (1) its pro forma consolidated debt-to-capital ratio would not materially change from 2015, remaining in the 45% to 47% range in 2016; (2) its pro forma deconsolidated debt-to-capital ratio is expected to remain around 20% at the end of 2016; (3) the Company’s pro forma deconsolidated credit metrics, such as cash flow-to-debt and cash flow-to-interest coverage ratios, would slightly improve from 2015 (the cash flow-to-debt ratio was 26.3% in 2015 and the cash flow-to-interest coverage was, including preferred dividends, 4.88 times in 2015) due mainly to stronger cash flow from hydro projects in North America in the first quarter of 2016. In addition, given the Company’s contractual profile (approximately 90% of generation output is contracted for 2016 and 2017) and with the expected incremental cash flow from the Acquisition, DBRS expects that the Company’s deconsolidated cash flow-related metrics will remain stable and will be consistent with the current ratings over the medium term.

The declaration of a Review was reported on PrefBlog in January. BRF was recently highlighted on PrefBlog for actually executing – in a small way – part of its NCIB for preferred shares.

Affected issues are BRF.PR.A, BRF.PR.B, BRF.PR.C, BRF.PR.E and BRF.PR.F.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 23rd, 2016 at 9:43 pm 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.