Quebecor cuts leverage to 2.5x from 7x over course of ‘many years’

By Devika Patel

Knoxville, Tenn., March 14 – Quebecor Inc. has reduced its leverage to 2.5x at the end of 2017 from over 7x some years ago, and management said that the company’s credibility in the financial market comes from having said it would reduce leverage and then actually doing so through cutting its dividends.

“We moved from a highly leveraged environment many years ago,” president and chief executive officer of Pierre Karl Peladeau said on the company’s fourth quarter and year ended Dec. 31 earnings conference call on Wednesday.

“Remember that we were even higher than 7x, and I think this is very important because we’ve built our credibility in the financial market by saying that we will reduce our leverage, and this is what we constantly did.

“We, at a certain point, decided that the leverage was too high so we cut the dividends and we re-established it a few years ago,” he said.

EBITDA was C$389 million at the end of the year, compared to C$355 million at the end of 2016.

At the end of the quarter, the company’s net debt to EBITDA ratio was 2.5x, down from 3.2x as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2016.

The company had available liquidity of more than C$2.2 billion at the end of the fourth quarter.

Quebecor is a Montreal-based holding company of media and telecommunications businesses.

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