Intrawest Officially Trading as a Public Company. What’s the Impact?
As many of you know, Intrawest, the owner of Steamboat, Winter Park, Tremblant, Stratton, Snowshoe, Mammoth, and half of Blue Mountain, started trading as a public company on January 31. The initial offering price for the stock was supposed to be $15 to $17, but it ended up going public at $12 in a soft stock market where fear of the Fed tapering and its impact on certain developing countries is taking its toll. As I write this Monday morning, the stock is at $11.78 at 9:40 AM Pacific time with the whole market taking another drubbing. The trading symbol is SNOW, which kind of makes sense.
I explained the rationale for the public offering a couple of weeks ago in this article. To summarize, they are great at running resorts, but the real estate crunch did them in. It left them with an untenable debt burden and they are resolving the problem by having most of the creditors agree to convert their debt to common stock. I guess I think they would have preferred another solution, but didn’t have one.
When I wrote my initial article, I did it based on an SEC filed S1 which didn’t have all the numbers filled in. That’s standard procedure. Now, with the company actually public, there’s a final prospectus with all those numbers, and I thought I’d point out a few things. You can see that document here.
The selling price is $12.00 a share, but the underwriting discount is $0.78 a share, so the selling shareholders get $11.22 a share before the costs of doing the deal.
With the deal done, the “initial shareholders” control 65.3% of the common stock. Those shareholders are all controlled by the Fortress Investment Group. For this discussion, you can pretty much think of Fortress as the seller of most of the shares.
As part of the deal, Fortress converted about $1.4 billion in debt to equity. Intrawest itself sold 3.125 million shares and will receive about $32 million. The initial shareholders sold 12.5 million shares and are receiving (probably on February 5th) about $140 million. To be clear, that $140 million is not available to Intrawest for operations. It goes to the entities who converted their debt to equity.
Let’s see what Intrawest has accomplished financially by doing this deal, starting with the income statement.
For the years ended June 30, 2011, 2012 and 2013, Intrawest reported net losses of $499 million, $336 million, and $296 million respectively. Yet in those same years, they had positive cash flow from operations of $21 million, $43 million and $42 million respectively.
If you look at the expenses for those years, you’ll see all kinds of noncash expenses for losses on sale of assets and impairments of goodwill, real estate, and long-lived assets. They are particularly big in 2011, and decline thereafter. The loss from operations is $197 million in 2011. It falls to $19 million in 2012 and is a positive $3.5 million in 2013.
But below the operating line is interest expense. Here’s the numbers for the three years in millions of dollars.
Interest expense on third party debt (143,463) (135,929) (98,437)
Interest expense on notes payable to affiliates (160,943) (195,842) (236,598)
Total Interest (304,406) (331,771) (335,035)
That, I think, can be characterized as a lot of interest and the bottom line, as indicated above, reflected it. What’s the impact of getting rid of it which, after all, is the purpose of Intrawest going public?
In a pro forma income statement they provided, which assumes the deal is done (it is done now), interest expense in the year ended June 30, 2013 falls from the $335 million shown above to $48 million. Net income goes from a loss of $296 million to a profit of $5.4 million. Quite a difference.
With the assets all written down to a reasonable value and interest expense reduced dramatically, Intrawest can now go about making money running resorts. That’s not a slam dunk, but it’s lower risk than mountain real estate right now. And who knows, maybe there will be a time in the future when those now low valued assets will be worth a bunch again.
