Dec. 18, 2002 – Schaumburg, IL – In a bid to cut its roughly $9 billion debt load, Motorola Inc. agreed to buy back $825 million of debt under a purchase agreement with Goldman Sachs & Co., according to Reuters.
The agreement with Goldman Sachs calls for Motorola to buy back $825 million of Puttable Reset Securities, or PURS, from the investment bank on Feb. 3, 2003.
Motorola expects to take a $98 million net nonoperating, pretax fourth-quarter charge for the repurchase. It also bought back $84 million of long-term debt in a series of private, fourth-quarter transactions.
The debt elimination will reduce the company’s interest expense in 2003 and cut its debt maturing within one year by more than half.
Motorola said it had $7.45 billion of long-term debt, $1.46 billion of short-term debt, and $6.4 billion of cash and cash equivalents at the end of the third quarter.