The BMW Group has signed a €8.0 billion syndicated revolving credit facility (RCF) with a tenor of five years and two one-year extension options.
A total of 43 international and regional banks from Europe, America and Asia have taken part in the transaction. With BNP Paribas, Citi and Deutsche Bank as coordinating bookrunners, the BMW Group has replaced the existing RCF of €8.0 billion signed in 2017.
For the first time, the BMW Group has consistently presented its strategic focus on sustainability within the syndication process: First, it handed a newly developed, comprehensive sustainability factsheet over to the banks involved to provide transparent information on its progress and goals. In a second step, the BMW Group issued questionnaires to the lenders, aiming at reflecting the outside-in perspectives of its sustainability performance, providing impetus for the continuous further development of sustainability communications.
“At the BMW Group, sustainability is practiced in its three facets -economically, ecologically and socially. It is present in the various divisions of the company, its goals are omnipresent, and sustainability is the focus of our long-term strategy. For the first time, we have comprehensively revealed our corresponding activities in a global financing process,” said Walter Mertl, Chief Financial Officer of BMW AG in Munich on Wednesday. “For us, sustainability means more than just achieving selected key figures. Our cross-company approach goes far beyond that, and we present our progress transparently and comprehensibly for the capital market and the public.”
The syndication process was completed by an exchange of the participating banks with the company’s sustainability experts, who explained and made transparent in more detail the strategic direction and sustainable transformation of the BMW Group.
The syndicated revolving credit line is one of the standard financing instruments of BMW Group Corporate Finance and serves to secure short-term access to liquidity. In the history of the company, the RCF has never been drawn.
