🎢Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee🎢
⚡️Update: WeWork⚡️
This was us covering the hourly news diarrhea that came out about WeWork in the last 48 hours alone:
Which, we suppose, is better than how the company’s equity and existing noteholders must be managing:
Or the fine bankers over at JPMorgan Chase ($JPM) who are tasked with finding capital markets suckers…uh…investors…who’d be so kind as extend this steaming pile a lifeline:
So, sifting through the constant headlines, where are we at?
Okay, right. The hot mess of a liquidity profile and limited amount of debt capacity to get a deal done. Nothing to see here. All good.
Reminder: it is widely believed that WeWork will run out of cash by the end of the year without a new deal in place. Axios reports:
The company reported $2.4 billion of cash at the end of June, with a first-half net loss of $904 million. At that pace, it should have been able to survive at least through the middle of 2020. But I'm told that it significantly increased spend in Q3, partially due to the lumpy nature of real estate cap-ex, believing it would be absorbed by $9 billion in proceeds from the IPO and concurrent debt deal. One source says that there's probably enough money to get through Thanksgiving, but not to Christmas.
Riiiiiight. So here are the options:
A Softbank Group new equity and debt bailout pursuant to which they get control of WeWork and napalm Masa’s former boy, Adam Neumann, in the process. This would reportedly be an aggregate $3b package “to get through the next year” — repeat, TO GET THROUGH THE NEXT YEAR — with the equity component coming significantly cheaper than the previous self-imposed $47b valuation (at a $10b valuation); or
JPM arranges some hodge-podge debt package and tests the market’s never-ceasing thirst for yield, baby, yield. The early reports were that the financing package would be $3b, comprised of $1 billion of 9-11% secured debt, $2b of unsecured PIK notes yielding 15% (1/3 cash pay, 2/3 PIK), and letter of credit availability. Wait, 15%?! How does a company with no liquidity even pay that? That’s why the PIK component is so critical: it would simply add 2/3 of the interest due to the principal of the debt. Said another way, the debt would compound annually and creep past $2.5b in two years. Per Bloomberg, “The $2 billion of proposed unsecured debt may carry an additional sweetener for investors: equity warrants designed so that investors could boost their return to around 30% if the company gets to a $20 billion valuation, according to the person who described the structure.” Because debt won’t dilute equity like Softbank’s equity-heavy proposal would, WeWork insiders (read: Neumann) apparently prefer the JPM approach. Regardless of what insiders prefer, however, is whether the market will be receptive to what one investor dubbed, per Bloomberg, “substantial career risk.”
We’re old enough to remember when WeWork’s notes rebounded a mere five days ago for reasons that were wildly inexplicable to us then and even more so now.
So, to summarize, who are the big winners? IWG/Regus ($IWGFF)(long?). We’re pretty sure they’re loving what’s happening here; we have to imagine that the inbound calls have to be on the upswing. Also, the restructuring professionals. Whether you’re Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP (Softbank), Houlihan Lokey ($HLI)(Softbank), or Perella Weinberg Partners (WeWork’s Board of Directors), you’re incurring more billables/fees than you expected to mere days weeks ago. Somehow, some way, the restructuring pros always seem to come out ahead. And, finally, Goldman Sachs ($GS). Because there’s nothing more Goldman-y than them selling their prop stock right out from under a proposed IPO.
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