The company has successfully completed its debt restructuring less than a year after filing under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Networking and communications vendor Avaya has announced that it has successfully completed its debt restructuring and emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy nearly a year after filing.
With a new board and leadership team, Avaya said it is now well positioned to deliver on its growth strategy and invest in contact centre and unified communications markets.
This is the beginning of an important new chapter for Avaya,» said the company’s president and CEO Jim Chirico. «In less than a year since the commencement of our Chapter 11 restructuring, Avaya has emerged as a publicly traded company with a significantly strengthened balance sheet.
«We have the flexibility we need to invest in the large and growing contact centre and unified communications markets as we complete our transformation to a software, services, and cloud solutions provider,» he added.
Chirico added that the reduction of the company’s debt and «certain other long-term obligations» will improve annual cash flow by around $300 million compared to fiscal 2016.
Avaya filed to restructure under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection back in January, saying at the time that the $725 million in debtor-in-possession financing, via Citibank, would be enough to minimise disruption and continue business operations.
It also said it was in negotiations to monetise some of its assets, but wouldn’t sell off its contact centre business, saying this would hurt its efforts to restructure debt. It agreed to sell its networking business to Extreme Networks two months later for approximately $100 million.
Avaya was spun off of Lucent Technologies in 2000 and became a private company in 2007 following an $8.2 billion deal with Silver Lake and TPG Capital. Avaya’s products cover communication and messaging, video conferencing, call centre, networking, and software and services. It expanded into networking in 2009 after it acquired Nortel Enterprise Solutions.
For the fiscal year ending September 30,2016, Avaya reported a net loss of $750 million on revenue of $3.7 billion.
