PrefBlog

BCE Inc. has announced (on November 18):

that none of its fixed rate Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series R (Series R Preferred Shares) will be converted into floating rate Cumulative Redeemable First Preferred Shares, Series Q (Series Q Preferred Shares) on December 1, 2020.

On October 15, 2020, BCE notified registered holders of Series R Preferred Shares that they could elect to convert their shares into Series Q Preferred Shares subject to the terms and conditions attached to those shares. Only 156,972 of BCE’s 8,000,000 Series R Preferred Shares were tendered for conversion on December 1, 2020 into Series Q Preferred Shares. As this would result in there being less than one million Series Q Preferred Shares outstanding, no Series R Preferred Shares will, as per the terms and conditions attached to those shares, be converted on December 1, 2020 into Series Q Preferred Shares. Registered holders who had elected to convert their Series R Preferred Shares will be receiving, by December 1, 2020, share certificates representing the number of Series R Preferred Shares tendered for conversion.

The Series R Preferred Shares will continue to be listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol BCE.PR.R. The Series R Preferred Shares will pay on a quarterly basis, for the five-year period beginning on December 1, 2020, as and when declared by the Board of Directors of BCE, a fixed cash dividend based on an annual dividend rate of 3.018%.

BCE.PR.R is a FixedFloater that reset to 4.490% in 2010 with no conversion to RatchetRate. It reset to 4.13% in 2015, and will reset to 3.018% effective 2020-12-1.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 30th, 2020 at 11:30 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.