Riding a hot construction market, Louisiana-Pacific executives have reworked their debt agreement so that they will pay less in interest and have the facility last longer.
Downtown-based LP — Chairman and CEO Brad Southern and his team recently said they will soon move to Midtown’s Broadwest office tower — first signed its current deal with American AgCredit and CoBank in 2013 and have amended it a few other times since, including last year as COVID took hold. The company didn’t have any outstanding borrowings on its books as of March 31.
Earlier this week, the parties reworked their agreement again, lowering future interest rates, adding a $300 million accordion option and pushing its maturity date to June 2027 from mid-2024, among other things.
Southern et. al are on a roll of late and posted a monster first quarter that further solidified LP’s finances. Southern in early May told analysts he was “very bullish” about the company’s outlook in the coming year.
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The directors of Steel Connect are asking shareholders to approve a reverse stock split that they say will make the company — which recently relocated its home office to Smyrna — more attractive to more investors.
In Steel Connect’s recently filed proxy statement, the board says the one-for-10 reverse split also will help the company — which owns direct marketing company IWCO Direct Holdings and supply chain manager ModusLink — stay off the Nasdaq Stock Market’s bad side because of a low stock price. Nasdaq regulators in the spring of last year noted that Steel Connect shares had traded below $1 for a while; that situation has since been resolved thanks in large part to a big run spurred by chatter that majority shareholder (and fellow publicly traded company) Steel Partners Holdings is looking to buy the 44 percent of Steel Connect it does not already own.
Shares of Steel Connect (Ticker: STCN) closed Thursday at $2.20. Year to date, they have nearly tripled. The Steel Connect board early this year formed a special committee to evaluate the company’s options in the face of the Steel Partners interest; it has not yet revealed its conclusions.