Moody’s raises Renault to Baa3

Moody's Investors Service said it upgraded the senior unsecured instrument ratings assigned to Renault SA to Baa3 from Ba1.

Concurrently, the agency upgraded the company's commercial paper rating to Prime-3 from Not-Prime, the senior unsecured medium-term note program ratings to provisional Baa3/provisional P-3 from provisional Ba1/provisional NP and assigned a Baa3 long-term senior unsecured issuer rating to Renault.

The action was prompted by continued operating margin improvements in the full year 2015.

The outlook on all the ratings is stable.

"Renault's new Baa3 investment grade ratings reflect the car maker's track record of maintaining positive and increasing free cash flow and fairly steady financial ratios, as well as delivering increased and sustained profitability in its automotive operations," Yasmina Serghini, Moody's vice president, senior credit officer and lead analyst for Renault, said in a news release.

"The success of its new generation of models combined with the recovery in Europe, its largest market, where we expect a positive sales momentum to continue in the next 12 months, and resilience in challenging Russian and Brazilian markets underpinned recent earnings improvements."

As part of this action, Moody's withdrew Renault's Ba1 corporate family rating, in line with the agency's policy for issuers migrating from non-investment grade to investment grade. It also withdrew the Ba1-PD probability of default rating.

© 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.