RFG retail food group limited

Out at $1.20, page-11

  1. 855 Posts.
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    You might be right, but i don't think it would've even got to investors. The bank/underwriter acts as the gatekeeper between the company (RFG) and potential investors. In RFG's case, they likely have an industrials banker charged with covering (providing services to) RFG, who would have checked in with his/her ECM team along the lines of: "hey guys, my client RFG is overlevered and needs to recap, can we do anything?", and then any ECM banker worth a pinch of salt would have responded with "i doubt we can't take this to investors because the business' sustainable earnings are indeterminable and none of our clients will touch it, and our internal risk controls won't allow us to sign off on an underwriting agreement for a company which we have no idea how to value and thus we have no idea how to price the offering and assess risk". This is not to mention the fact that, once banks start talking (even on a 'no-names' basis) to clients regarding deal metrics, they encounter a whole host of laws and obligations regarding confidentiality, not breaching Chinese walls, reputation risk and so on.

    I suppose everything has a price - a bank would eventually take a chance at underwriting a secondary offering if the discount to market price was sufficiently large (like, in RFG's case, an enormous discount), but those situations are quite rare as company boards tend not to like signing off on savagely discounted secondary offerings unless it is literally the only option left at their disposal (happened quite a bit in 2007-2009).

    That $80-$100m EBITDA in two years' time may be right, but with everything going on with RFG at the moment there's no reasonable basis to put forward that figure - they could just as easily be doing $40-$50m EBITDA once they bring down franchising fees / increase franchisee support, lose their ability to make high-margin franchise flipping fees, and close hundreds of outlets.
 
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