Moody's might drop Maestro Peru

Moody's Investors Service said it placed Maestro Peru SA's Ba2 corporate family rating and Ba2 senior unsecured rating under review for downgrade.

The review follows a weaker-than-expected same store sales growth for the first half of 2013, leading to higher leverage, while internal liquidity may be insufficient to continue company's current store opening plans for the next few years.

"For the first half of 2013, Maestro continued to have good top-line growth, but due to the faster pace of new store openings in the 1H2013 (4 stores) vs. 1H2012 (1 store), same store sales growth was only 2% and reported operating margin for the first half of 2013 was 6.9% vs. 7.5% in the same period in 2012," Moody's senior credit officer Soummo Mukherjee said in a news release.

"Additionally, due to an approximate 10% depreciation of the Peruvian Soles against the USD since the beginning of the year, Maestro's leverage, as measured by Total Debt to EBITDA, was 5.9 times," Mukherjee added in the release.

© 2015 Prospect News.
All content on this website is protected by copyright law in the U.S. and elsewhere. For the use of the person downloading only.
Redistribution and copying are prohibited by law without written permission in advance from Prospect News.
Redistribution or copying includes e-mailing, printing multiple copies or any other form of reproduction.