This story is developing and will be updated.
Marc Metrick, chief executive officer of Saks Global, spent much of the year calming vendors, easing them into a new payment schedule and reassuring them that the combination of Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus Group would be better for the industry overall.
On Monday, he moved on to bondholders, who have been getting antsy themselves. To buy Neiman’s last year and transform the business, Saks sold $2.2 billion of junk bonds — upsizing from an initial $2 billion given interest in the market. But bond investors are now taking a more cautious tack and were trading that debt at just 64 cents on the dollar last week as they gauged Saks and its prospects in a suddenly much more chaotic and tariff-infused market.
Metrick told WWD that his message to bondholders was similar to his message to the market, that Saks Global is playing out as envisioned and was still on solid footing, even as it looked to adjust its financing in light of changes in the market.
“We told the world this morning, we’ve got between $350 million and $400 million of liquidity today,” Metrick said in an interview on Monday.
The company is exploring what’s known as a FILO facility, which Metrick said was similar to a term loan and would be structured within the company’s $1.8 billion asset-backed lending facility.
While there are certain covenants restricting the use of the ABL facility, having part of that in a FILO facility would give Saks more immediate access to the cash.
“We’re not adding incremental debt capacity to the business,” the CEO said.
Saks will need to have some cash on hand. In addition to payments to vendors for new goods, paid on a 90-day schedule, the retailer has past due payments to brands its going to start making. It also has its first, roughly $120 million interest payments on the bonds, which is due June 30.
It’s a lot of moving parts, but Metrick is used to operating under pressure and has remained upbeat despite the increasingly complicated picture.
Marc Metrick
Courtesy
“Everything that’s going on is exactly as planned,” Metrick said. “Obviously you have a macro situation with tariffs and trade and the market, but…go back a couple months to December of ‘24, I said to people, ‘I’m going to reset the market and I’m going to change how working capital model works between the brands and the department stores.’
“I said that we were going to go after synergies and redundancies in the business and start to build a much better, much more fortified balance sheet. And I said we were going to utilize both our existing capabilities through our data and through our selling force, but utilize that with our new partners at Amazon, Salesforce and Authentic to help drive growth.”
And all of that is done or underway, he said.
“We’ve executed the change in the working capital,” Metrick said. “It is beginning to take, the seeds are beginning to take hold, goods are beginning to flow. We’re starting to see the pulse return back to the business. The narrative and the overall sort of conversations with our brand partners are much less about payments and much more about, ‘How do we grow? Let’s build a strategy. Let’s build a plan.’ So that that’s sort of taking hold.”
The company is also realizing the synergized promised with the deal and more, cutting costs as Saks and Neiman’s are brought under one umbrella.
“We said this year we were going to realize $100 million in synergy,” Metrick said. “We are now forecasting to realize $150 million. We’re getting close with [a deal with] Amazon and that’s coming and that’s going to be something. So it is check, check, check on what we said we were going to do.”
