Grass Valley completes $220 million strategic refinancing

Grass Valley has announced the successful completion of a $220 million strategic refinancing led by certain investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Private Credit.

The strategic refinancing will both strengthen the company’s balance sheet and refinance existing debt. According to the company, it serves to extend the momentum from a successful 2023, both operationally and financially.

Operationally, the company completed its planned business transformation, having simplified the organisational structure, made key new appointments across the leadership team, optimised its global footprint, and focused the product portfolio to align with the changing media landscape. The business transformation allowed the company to further extend its significant investments in software and integrated hardware solutions.

Financially, the business delivered strong results in 2023. This included growing revenue, with its strongest year since 2020 for live production and networking infrastructure hardware, and a significant increase in recurring revenue with AMPP revenues nearly doubling over last year. In addition, earnings increased over 100% while the company hired nearly 200 employees globally and saw its patent portfolio expand significantly due to its continued investments in innovation.

“The media industry is still in the early stages of defining the future of live production workflows and this investment further allows Grass Valley to accelerate our market leadership in support of this industry-wide transition,” said Grass Valley chairman and CEO, Louis Hernandez Jr. “With our surging performance from 2023, and now a stronger balance sheet, we intend to accelerate innovation across our entire portfolio, most notably in the AMPP ecosystem, as we begin to scale deployments across our global customer base.”

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By completing this refinancing, Grass Valley will now accelerate its investment across the combined GVMU integrated hardware and software solutions, enabled by AMPP.

“We are excited to partner with Grass Valley and its management team on this transaction,” said Peter Ma, managing director, Morgan Stanley Private Credit. “The flexibility embedded within our senior debt investment along with the company’s leading market position, comprehensive product portfolio and positive operating momentum position the business for significant future success.”