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From bad to worse for Station Casinos financially
By Zach Arnold | December 24, 2008
Originally published on December 16th.
Reuters reported yesterday that Station Casinos Inc is in a very precarious position right now with creditors. This paragraph is scary enough:
The failure of the debt exchange leaves the company in a precarious position, as analysts anticipate it may trip terms in its bank debt by the end of the year and will need to negotiate with bank lenders to avoid a default.
Chapter 11 is certainly not Chapter 7 in terms of bankruptcy proceedings, but this is certainly not a positive development. Neither is this story about Station Casinos temporarily halting matching 401(k) contributions to current employees.
How’s this news playing out internationally? The Sydney Morning Herald in Australia reports that Crown invested $242 million USD into Station Casinos and that the investment may now be ‘worthless.’ Standard & Poors has cut their rating on Station’s secured debt to ‘negative.’
Update (12/24): From bad to worse for Station Casinos. There will be a lot of restructuring of debt, but a significant price will be paid. The Las Vegas Review-Journal put it best today — “Station Casinos taps credit line.” Merry Christmas.
Topics: Media, Zach Arnold | 15 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback | Share This
In the good news, it looks like Comcast has started rolling out HDNet nationally (just showed up here in Boston). So whoever is left standing other than UFC will have a much more significant outlet for their programming now.
However, in order for people like me (time warner cable customer), and possibly others, to get HDNet, you need to subscribe to it along with like 5 other HD channels in a package for over 20 bucks.
I really wish I could just subscribe to HDNet for less than $10.
I think that HDNet Movies may end up on a premium tier on Comcast as well. Hopefully the cable companies will get with it and junk all the 250 standard def channels and just give us HD only packages at a reasonable price.
Ha, yeah, I wish I lived in a world full of peace and love too.
Re: station, they just picked a bad time to buy back their operations. If they had the wiggle room to wait out the bad times like the other casinos then they’d be fine. They just took on a massive amount of debt to go private at the WRONG time.
It will be interesting to see what the creditors do. I’m sure they recognize the fact that Station will lose money until the economy shapes up regardless of who holds it. If they cut a deal with Station then at very least they give it a chance to survive and pay back the money they’re owed eventually. This wasn’t a business that was run poorly. It’s just a victim of a very specific set of circumstances
I pay an extra $12 a month for my HD-DVR box, and HDnet comes free with that small group of channels. I have Time Warner as well.
Fightlinker it wasn’t a business run particularly well either as there have been several class action suits filed against them by their own employees and at least one by their customers.
I have the same deal Zack does
On unrelated news Will Ribeiro is in a coma after a motorcycle accident. Get better dude
I also have an HD DVR box from time warner and I do not get those channels. Around here (NYC) no one gets HDNet for free just for having an HD DVR box. That would be nice.
The larger cable systems are often composed of lots of smaller systems that they bought up, and so they can differ from place to place depending on what was in place when they bought them out.
HDNet has been on some Comcast local systems for some time, but they only recently settled their differences with Cuban allowing it to go nationwide.
I expect it’s the same with TWC.
Go HDNet!!
I’m in the Northeast and have Comcast. I do not have HDNet yet. Hopefully soon. I’ve been getting a lot more HD Channels (or what they call HD). The only two channels I want in HD are HDNet and SpikeTV.
Yeah, Spike is the last one on my list since I’ve got Versus and HDNet now.
Merry Christmas Station muahaha
good for station casinos .. have you tried to make a room reservation there.. its out sourced to INDIA its awfull its there own fault and greed they are going under. its about time. there service sucks..