Strong response to Hammerson bond buy-back tender

Property group Hammerson has been snowed under with Dutch auction bids from investors keen to sell back their bonds to the company, and has had to scale down its tender offer.

The company expects to accept for purchase around 92.3% of all bonds tendered as per the non-competitive tender instructions of its recently announced tender offer to buy back up to €700m of 4.875% bonds due 2015.

As at the expiration deadline for the tender offer, €243.1m worth of bonds (based on their nominal redemption value) had been tendered for purchase pursuant to non-competitive tender instructions,

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No bonds tendered pursuant to the competitive tender instructions will be bought.

The final purchase price is expected to be set on Thursday afternoon. In the event that the company decides to accept valid tenders of bonds pursuant to the offer, the Company expects to set the actual acceptance amount at €219.95m and expects to set the purchase spread at the maximum indicated, namely 1.25 percentage points.

All bonds repurchased will be cancelled, furthering Hammerson's objective of reducing its running cost of maintaining its debt by using excess current liquidity to reduce the number of short-dated bonds it has in the market.

JH