by winston » Thu Nov 20, 2014 10:54 am
not vested
Yanlord outlook revised to negative by S&P on slower-than-expected sales and revenue recognition; 'BB-' rating affirmed
HONG KONG (Nov 19): Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said today that it had revised its outlook on Yanlord Land Group ( Financial Dashboard) to negative from stable.
At the same time, it jas affirmed its 'BB-' long-term corporate credit rating on the China-based property developer and its 'BB-' long-term issue rating on the company's outstanding senior unsecured notes.
As a result of the outlook revision, it has lowered its long-term Greater China regional scale ratings on Yanlord and the notes to 'cnBB' from 'cnBB+'.
"We revised the outlook because Yanlord's high-end product positioning casts uncertainty over the company's recovery prospects in 2015, and we believe this could weaken its cash flow adequacy and leverage," said Standard & Poor's credit analyst Dennis Lee.
In S&P’s view, the correction in China's property market will continue over the next 12 months, which would drive the demand for mass-market products and not favor Yanlord's product positioning.
In addition, S&P expects the company's sales and revenue recognition to be lower than its projection this year. As a result, its credit protection metrics will weaken and key ratios such as EBITDA interest coverage will drop below S&P’s downgrade trigger of 3x in 2014.
“We expect Yanlord to miss its 2014 contracted sales target of Chinese renminbi (RMB) 16 billion. In our base case, we estimate the company's contracted sales to be about RMB13 billion, which is about 13% lower than its sales in 2013,” said S&P.
Yanlord's contracted sales were RMB6.3 billion in the first three quarters of this year. S&P factored in a sales recovery in the fourth quarter as the company launches more projects during this time. It attributes Yanlord's lower-than-expected sales performance to a weakened market sentiment and tightened credit conditions during the year.
“We expect the company's contracted sales to grow 15% in 2015, to reflect higher construction expenditure for new projects in 2014. However, Yanlord's mid-to-high-end product positioning will remain a challenge for sales under the current market condition where end-users dominate demand,” the ratings agency added.
We lowered our estimate of Yanlord's revenue recognition to about RMB12 billion. The company recognized revenue of RMB4.25 billion in the first three quarters of 2014, down 35% from the same period last year. We note that the company has about RMB11.8 billion of unrecognized sales as of the end of September, of which it expects to recognize about 60% in this year. However, Yanlord's key credit protection metrics could be weaker than what we expect if the company experiences any delivery slippage.
S&P expects Yanlord's profitability will gradually decline in 2014 and 2015. In its view, the company's change in business strategy and product mix to increase sales for end-user demand and adopt a more competitive pricing strategy to increase asset churn would pressure its margin.
In its base-case scenario, S&P expects Yanlord to manage its borrowings with discipline. It estimates that the company's debt will moderately increase to about RMB19.5 billion in 2014 and RMB22 billion in 2015, from RMB18 billion in 2013. However, S&P is forecasting that Yanlord's EBITDA interest coverage will drop to 2.5x-3x in 2014, from 3.2x in 2013, because of lower-than-expected sales and revenue recognition and declining profitability. At the same time, the company's debt-to-EBITDA ratio will also weaken to 5x-5.5x, from 4.7x.
Yanlord's credit metrics could slightly improve in 2015, given our expectation of higher sales. However, we estimate that EBITDA interest coverage will remain less than 3x and the debt-to-EBITDA ratio will stay about 5x. S&P has therefore revised the company's financial risk profile to "aggressive" from "significant”.
Yanlord closed 1.4% lower at $1.085 today.
Source: The Edge
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