The last time we looked, Hovnanian Enterprises was trying for lower financial leverage. We saw signs of progress along those lines, but we were concerned about the company’s financial flexibility. Let’s see if they made any progress in the last six months.
Using cash reserves, the company brought debt down from $2.5 billion in 2008 to $1.8 billion in 2009. But debt was stuck at $1.7 billion in the second quarter of 2010. Cash flow wasn’t strong enough to let Hovnanian pay down more debt, and the company was reluctant use any of its $459 million in cash reserves.
Hovnanian also made big changes in its debt maturity structure between 2008 and 2009, as the chart shows. It cut $1.1 billion of the debt maturing between 2012 and 2015 by targeting prepayments on debt maturing in those years and by refinancing $785 million of old debt with new, senior secured notes due in 2016.
But the company was able to prepay only $100 million of its 2012-2015 maturities in the first half of 2010 — again because of weak cash flow and the need for large cash reserves. Ironically, one reason Hovnanian needed so much cash is that it had no revolving credit to help with liquidity needs. The company was forced to cancel its $300 million revolver to do the $785 million debt issue in 2009.
The lesson is that financial risk can be hard to manage. It involves complex trade-offs among leverage, flexibility, and liquidity. Hovnanian was able to reduce leverage and improve flexibility in 2009, but only by compromising liquidity. And it still has a $1.1 billion mountain of debt to climb in 2016.