Warner Bros./Paramount Skydance deal spawns $15B leveraged loan, largest since Global Financial Crisis Warner Bros.
Discovery (WBD) this week wrapped its $15 billion-equivalent cross-border term loan B financing, a record-setting deal for transaction size in the leveraged loan market
WBD goes into the record books as the second-largest TLB syndication of all time, trailing only the $16.45 billion TXU deal in 2007. For additional context, there have only been three USD institutional loan deals ever totaling $10 billion or more, and two of those were before the Global Financial Crisis. That makes WBD the largest TLB transaction post-GFC, both by the $15 billion total facility size and by the $13 billion US dollar tranche size, topping Broadcom’s November 2015 deal at $10.74 billion across US and European facilities ($9.75 billion in USD).
It is also the largest loan ever issued by a non-sponsored borrower. Final tranche sizes for WBD were $13 billion for the US dollar-denominated TLB and €1.717 billion for the euro loan. Final pricing for the seven-year term loans came tight to talk for both spread and OID at S/E+250 with a 99.75 OID.