
Klockner Pentaplast: Let's Face The Music...
Helen Rodriguez - Head of European Special Situations, CreditSights
22 August 2025
Insights into Klockner Pentaplast restructuring risks, market signals, and negotiation themes, including:
- Bond Price Movements for Klockner Pentaplast: Explore what the recent drop in bond prices reveals about shifting investor confidence and default risk.
- Refinancing Versus Restructuring Scenarios: Assess the transition from a sponsor-backed refinancing plan to increasing discussion of hard restructuring and Chapter 11 options.
- Operational and Market Headwinds: Review the company’s exposure to tariffs, inflation, and negative cash flow, and their impact on financial stability.
- Challenges of Limited Financial Transparency: Examine how information gaps are affecting valuation and complicating stakeholder decisions.
- Sponsor and Creditor Negotiation Dynamics: Consider the evolving role of SVP and the potential implications for the balance of power among key stakeholders.
Bonds are down to the 70s per Bloomberg, reflecting a shift in the negotiating dance. Plan A, an SVP-sponsored financing, is now morphing into hard restructuring conjecture. We are not privy to the details, but press reports US/EMEA Special Situations: Kloeckner Pentaplast sub bonds being shopped at 54 after chapter 11 becomes an option indicate a day of reckoning has superseded the SVP-marketed refinancing. Unless of course, this is sponsor bluff in order to extract further concessions from creditors. Time will tell.
In Kloeckner Pentaplast: Carry on Kleo we had laid out the basis of the agreement with the Seniors back in April 2025:
“the question now is how to structure the par, we assume, proposal for the senior secured instruments to make it sufficiently enticing. The main challenge in structuring the next refi is that coupons are quite low for the risk already, and FCF is already heavily negative. The company needs to sell a credible cash flow story to the market or offer value crystallization some other way. As ever, this raises the problem of the real (as opposed to the marketed) EBITDA picture where as at 3Q24, after some €55 mn of Adjustments, the tally is only up to Adjusted EBITDA of €240 mn. The pressure is on for the turnaround to crystallise, against a reality of new headwinds every quarter. The interest burden was €150 mn LTM.”