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What is ‘DIP ‘Business Financing?

Guest post by: Stan Prokop

Article Overview: The articles provide insights into the concept of Debtor in Possession Financing as working capital and term debt for distressed firms .

What is ‘DIP ‘Business Financing?

Many business people and financial managers are not aware of the term 'DIP' Financing - which stands for 'Debtor in Possession' financing.

DIP financing revolves around companies who are in distress and more often than not, in fact almost always, in a bankruptcy proceeding. Why would any firm want to finance a bankrupt company?

The answer is that many firms, especially those that are larger and have significant assets have a strong chance of emerging from bankruptcy, obviously as a stronger company ( less debt of course ) and a more reasonable chance of being successful and profitable again . We say ' less debt 'of course because the original secured lenders of assets ,etc are in fact going to take a partial, or in some cases whole loss on their original financing.

DIP is clearly a very specialized area. Lenders who are specialized in this area enjoy the highest level of security over the assets they are temporarily financing.

Naturally the goal of the company while it is in a temporary bankruptcy (U.S. = Chapter 11 - Canada = CCAA ') is to emerge with new financing. The players and leaders in this specialized area of financing tend to be banks and specialized independent finance firms with significant capital and expertise. It is of course ironic that many of the banks that finance firms and take losses also have specialized DIP divisions which provide capital to the bankrupt firm .

The essence of DIP financing is that the DIP lender is given a super priority security on the assets of the firm. It goes without saying that when a company is in a bankruptcy preceding that the interest rates on the financing can in many cases be quite a bit higher than the customer enjoyed in its normal operating business model.

The advantage of a DIP lender are several - many times they are in fact over secured. That is to say, as an example, that a DIP lender may be providing a 5 Million dollar financing for the customer during bankruptcy, while the total assets might be values significantly higher. In many cases DIP financing are very large, and in that case two or in fact a number of lenders, band together to create the temporary working capital financing for the firm as it re - organizes.

In some cases DIP lenders may intend to take a future partial ownership in the post bankrupt firm , as well as of course ,their place in line as priority lender over all others .

Many larger institutions actually create large multi million (billion?) funds that focus solely on making investments in DIP financing and partial future ownership of the firm. In general the competition for DIP financing is in fact growing - as ironic as it seems to the lay person and non finance professional, there is money in bankruptcy!

Naturally if a company is in bankruptcy there is still certain, if not a large amount of risk involved in DIP financing and the chances of a final successful emergence and re-financing of a firm. That is where experience comes to play, as seasoned DIP lenders know their industries and work out and re-finance strategies very well.

When a firm does successfully arrange DIP financing most finance professionals take that as a sign though that there is a strong chance that the company will re-emerge. Most importantly, as yet undiscussed, is the fact that DIP financing allows the company to continue on to sell, pay suppliers, employees, etc . Stopping a company in its key operating activities is of course highly risky with respect to a successful re-emergence of the firm .

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Article Tags: debtor in possession



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