Downsized Yum! prices, Wesco drives by, CVR on tap; short Weatherford paper up on tender

By Paul Deckelman and Paul A. Harris

New York, June 2 – The high-yield primary market saw its first new issues price in a week on Thursday as a pair of deals got done in three tranches.

Fast-food giant Yum! Brands, Inc. priced a downsized two-part offering totaling $2.1 billion as a regularly scheduled forward-calendar offering. The transaction consisted of tranches of eight- and 10-year notes, each sized at $1.05 billion.

The day’s other deal was a quick-to-market $350 million offering of eight-year notes from Wesco International, Inc.

Sources said that there would likely be some further issuance on Friday, when CVR Partners, LP, a nitrogen fertilizer producer, is expected to price a scheduled $625 million offering of seven-year secured notes

Away from the new deals, Weatherford International plc’s nearest-maturity bonds pushed higher in active trading, helped by Wednesday’s announcement that the oilfield services provider will tender for four soon-maturing series of its notes, and Thursday’s news that the company had sold $1.1 billion of new five-year exchangeable senior notes to fund that tender offer.

Chemours Co.’s bonds, and its shares, plunged during the day in busy trading after a short-seller firm, Citron Research, issued a scathingly critical report about the chemical company, which was spun off last year from industry giant DuPont. But the stock rallied and the bonds cut their losses after Chemours issued a strongly worded rebuttal.

Flows of investor funds into or out of high-yield mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, considered a reliable barometer of overall junk market liquidity trends, were back on the upside. Some $145 million more came into those weekly-reporting-only domestic funds than left them in the form of investor redemptions during the week ended Wednesday.

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