PrefBlog

BCE Inc. has announced (on September 14):

that none of its fixed-rate Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series AQ (Series AQ Preferred Shares) will be converted into floating-rate Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series AR (Series AR Preferred Shares) on October 1, 2018.

On August 31, 2018, notice was provided that holders of Series AQ Preferred Shares could elect to convert their shares into Series AR Preferred Shares subject to the terms and conditions attached to those shares. Only 93,593 of BCE’s 9,200,000 Series AQ Preferred Shares were tendered for conversion on October 1, 2018 into Series AR Preferred Shares. As this would result in there being less than one million Series AR Preferred Shares outstanding, no Series AQ Preferred Shares will be converted on October 1, 2018 into Series AR Preferred Shares, as per the terms and conditions attached to those shares.

The Series AQ Preferred Shares will continue to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol BCE.PR.Q. The Series AQ Preferred Shares will pay on a quarterly basis, for the five-year period beginning on September 30, 2018, as and when declared by the Board of Directors of BCE, a fixed quarterly cash dividend based on an annual dividend rate of 4.812%.

It will be recalled that BCE.PR.Q will reset at 4.812% effective September 30.

BCE.PR.Q is a FixedReset that came into being through an Exchange from BAF.PR.E which in turn commenced trading 2013-2-14 as a FixedReset, 4.25%+264, after being announced 2013-1-30.

I recommended against conversion.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 at 5:17 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.