Power Corporation of Canada and Power Financial Corporation have announced:
Upon completion of the offering, Power Financial intends to redeem all of its outstanding $200 million First Preferred Shares, Series I.
The offering in the quoted paragraph refers to a today’s announcement of a new issue of 4.50% Straight Perpetuals.
PWF.PR.I is a Straight Perpetual, 6.00%, that commenced trading 2003-3-11. It has been tracked by HIMIPref™ and is assigned to the PerpetualPremium subindex.
Update, 2021-11-13: On October 18, the company announced:
that it intends to redeem all 8,000,000 of its outstanding 6.00% Non-Cumulative First Preferred Shares, Series I (the “Series I Shares”) on November 22, 2021.
In accordance with the terms of the Series I Shares, the redemption price will be $25.00 per Series I Share (for a total of $200 million) together with any declared and unpaid dividends, net of any tax required to be withheld by the Corporation. A notice of the redemption of the Series I Shares will be provided in accordance with the rights, privileges and conditions attached to the Series I Shares.
In 2019 when POW and PWF reorganized their share structure it was announced that $350M of preferred shares would be redeemed. That was never acted upon to my knowledge. The speculation then in this blog was that PWF.PR.I would be part of that $350M redemption as it was the highest yielding PWF preferred issue.
With no time frame for the PWF.PR.I redemption announced in the current press release, is this more of the same? Will PWF actually make a redemption? The market reacted and the price went to around $25.40 (change of about-$.60) which is more than par + one dividend of $.375. So some buyers are expecting more than one dividend. There is money to be made here for those who guess right or have inside knowledge. PWF should be fair to all investors and announce something definite.
This announcement seems clear to me. As soon as the new offering is completed circa Oct 15th, the I issue will be redeemed. Why not with coupon at 6%? Scotia’s underwriting allotment of the new issue has already closed on Scotia iTrade.
Back in 2019 they didn’t specify redemption of PWO.PR.I, just a total of $350 million.
What’s different now is that they have actually identified the issue to be redeemed. I agree with AltaRed.
For the $350M to be redeemed, PWF.PR.I and PWF.PR.G were the likely candidates. Also, at the time they announced the $350M, they indicated they didn’t have any intention of more redemptions, albeit with rather tepid wording.
Some other issues were weak in the last couple of days, such as PWF.PR.O and POW.PR.C. Interesting questions now are, how soon before the other $200M redemption, and for how long will the others be safe given the shifting preferred share landscape?