Associated British Ports (ABP) has become the first port operator to gain an external credit rating and tap into the bond market in the last decade.

    ABP has done this by successfully raising £500m of bonds and £1.86bn of bank facilities. The company says that this is a proactive approach to the ongoing financial crisis, rather than a reactive approach to tough conditions later down the line.

    Sebastian Bull, CFO of ABP, said to Port Strategy: “The refinancing has put ABP in an excellent position and enabled us to diversify our portfolio of maturities through a mixture of bank and bond debt.”

    He added: “The platform is now in place which will enable ABP to take advantage of any competitively priced investor pool in future – giving us complete flexibility to access markets wherever and whenever we like.”

    There were lessons learned by the finance experts too – the refinancing provided an opportunity to educate the rating agencies about the port sector and ABP’s port landlord model, in particular.

    The refinancing frees up ABP to focus on more investment too – namely projects at Grimsby, Green Port Hull and Southampton in 2012.

(source:http://www.portstrategy.com/news101)