Telefonica secures $1bn export credit facility from Ericsson

Spanish operator group Telefonica has secured a $1bn export credit facility to purchase equipment from Swedish infrastructure vendor Ericsson over the next ten years.

The operator has signed a jumbo export credit facility with Société Générale Corporate & Investment Banking (SG CIB) as agent and mandated lead arranger (MLA) with three other MLAs: The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, BNP Paribas Fortis and Santander. An MLA generally has the leading role in this financing stage of a project; often underwriting the financing.

The purpose of the facility is to finance deliveries of network equipment and commissioning services from Ericsson to Telefonica subsidiaries, situated in various countries, the operator said.

The facility is supported by Swedish authority EKN as export credit agency and SEK (Swedish Export Credit Corporation) for the funding.

“Ericsson has very good support from the Kingdom of Sweden,” Ericsson CFO Jan Frykhammar told Telecoms.com inan April 2010 interview. “They back us so that any bank can lend money to an operator under the guarantee of the Export Credit Agency of Sweden. We have always done a lot of export credit financing as part of our business, it’s nothing new for us. Ericsson doesn’t carry a large amount of the risk because that goes to Sweden or Canada, or wherever, because we’re using ECAs in the countries where we export from.”