What: Shares of SunEdison Inc (SUNEQ) fell as much as 29% mid-day on Wall Street Tuesday after another analyst questioned the company's long-term survival.
So what: Analyst Gordon Johnson at Axiom Capital Management raised more concerns about the company's recent debt restructuring. Details of that restructuring can be seen here, but the short story is that SunEdison traded debt for a combination of equity and new debt that actually holds a higher interest payment than the old debt.
What's concerning is that the restructuring came with debt that holds an interest rate in excess of 10%, incredibly high considering the fact that SunEdison bid aggressively to win projects on the idea that it had a low cost of capital. Johnson said on a podcast this morning, "I don't know how much longer the equity can last."
Now what: SunEdison has been in a downward spiral and it's a situation that will be almost impossible to get out of at this point. The company needs low cost funding to build projects and needs new projects to pay for debt already on the balance sheet. With both working against the company there's not a likely scenario where it can get enough funding to dig out of its current hole. For investors, the risk of bankruptcy sometime in the next year is too big to ignore and I see no reason to buy the stock now.
