Bonds sold on Telegram – Kommersant FM
[ad_1]
Telegram issued bonds for $330 million, the founder of the messenger Pavel Durov announced this in his channel. He called the placement conditions the most favorable for the company in its entire history. According to him, the bonds were bought by “world funds of the highest level with an impeccable reputation.” The businessman did not specify which ones exactly. Telegram issued bonds for the first time in 2021. The new placement is the fourth in a row, and now the company’s total debt is estimated at $2.3 billion.
How accessible are Telegram papers? And how will the company pay its holders? Dmitry Alexandrov, managing director of the investment company Ivolga Capital, answered these questions to Kommersant FM: “All Telegram placements were carried out through a closed subscription, when a limited number of funds, family offices or institutional investors have access to it. Some time ago, in the latest issue, BCS clients had the opportunity to indirectly invest in these securities, but there was an extremely complex scheme. It was an option on such bonds, and still the real holder of the bonds was the institutional investor.
At the same time, bonds are a fairly conservative instrument. The main idea behind the purchase was the possibility of potential conversion of such securities. But, as far as I understand, the latest placement is the Plain Vanilla Bond, that is, it is just debt without any conversion options, and derivative instruments lose their meaning.
However, little is known about the financial condition of Telegram. Recently, there have been attempts to monetize the service, which in general can be called successful, but still insufficient to fully service the debt. In any case, such investments are a growth story.
Probably, the players who are currently involved in debt financing expect to receive some kind of stake in the company in the future. Therefore, I would say that the most realistic format is to attract capital investors, perhaps through an IPO transaction.
Until this happens, the debt can be refinanced; after all, the service itself remains extremely in demand from a consumer point of view, and the volume of attractions on a global scale is not so large.”
At the beginning of March, Pavel Durov gave his first interview in seven years. He told the Financial Times that he was offered to sell Telegram for $30 billion. The businessman also did not rule out an IPO in the foreseeable future. And a new bond issue may be a preparation for it, says Finam analyst Leonid Delitsyn:
“We can assume that Durov is really starting to prepare the company for a full or partial sale, and the new bond issue is in its own way an analogue of a Pre-IPO.
That is, during the transaction, of course, there were expectations for a larger fundraising, for example, during an initial public offering with a valuation of, say, $30 billion or higher, and, accordingly, for raising funds of the order of $1.5 billion, or even $3 billion from the sale of securities. Most likely, this loan will be comparable to Telegram’s annual expenses, which will allow it to survive for some time, restructure something, and perhaps quickly prepare for a listing or to attract a strategist.”
In an interview with the Financial Times, Durov also spoke about the growth of the Telegram audience, up to 900 million people. The figure has almost doubled in three years, the businessman assures. Nevertheless, the messenger is far from its main competitor: the WhatsApp application is regularly used by almost 2 billion people. The service belongs to Meta, which is recognized as an extremist organization in Russia and is banned.
Everything is clear with us – Telegram channel “Kommersant FM”.
[ad_2]
Source link