Wintrust’s commercial finance team recently provided additional support to a long-time client, a coal mining company generating over $4 billion in revenue. Wintrust has been a trusted resource to the company for over eight years.
The company needed to replace aging underground longwall shields from a foreign vendor, requiring over $65 million in financing. With a desire to preserve their liquidity, they were interested in partnering with someone to provide progress payments to their vendor overseas, along with a final operating lease structure at final delivery. The amount of funding needed was on the larger side for any one bank, so the team had to find a way to bring in additional capital-markets partners for a transaction in an industry that’s often viewed as unfavorable.
Wintrust’s commercial finance team successfully peeled back layers to fully understand the customer’s business and its complexities, including capex needs, structuring desires, and changing industry dynamics. With strong capital market relationships, Wintrust Commercial Finance was able to bring in three other capital partners and provide an interest-only progress payment facility and an operating lease structure with early buyout at final equipment delivery, bringing $65,759,751 to fund these underground shields.
“Even with multiple hurdles to clear, we were able to deliver,” Justin Piot, vice president, business development for commercial finance at Wintrust, said. “Our team had to work together seamlessly to execute on such a large transaction, and in what’s generally perceived as an unfavorable industry with tough underground mining collateral, and a foreign vendor requiring monthly progress payments.”
The client was able to conserve liquidity and revolver capacity.
