Grass Valley Secures $220M Refinancing

Grass Valley announces the successful completion of a $220 million strategic refinancing led by certain investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Private Credit. The strategic refinancing will both strengthen the company’s balance sheet and refinance existing debt, while further positioning Grass Valley to lead the reimagination of the future workflow for media through its Grass Valley Media Universe (GVMU) suite of solutions.

The refinancing serves to extend the momentum from a successful 2023, both operationally and financially, for Grass Valley. Operationally, the company completed its planned business transformation, having simplified the organizational structure, made key new appointments across the leadership team, optimized its global footprint, and focused the product portfolio to align with the changing media landscape. The business transformation allowed the company to further extend its investments in software and integrated hardware solutions as part of the most advanced cloud-native media platform in the industry. Through these investments customers are now realizing savings and workflow agility while producing the most watched content in the world.

Financially, the business delivered strong results in 2023. This included growing revenue, with its strongest year since 2020 for live production and networking infrastructure hardware, and a significant increase in recurring revenue with AMPP revenues nearly doubling over last year. In addition, earnings increased over 100% while the company hired nearly 200 employees globally and saw its patent portfolio expand significantly due to its continued investments in innovation.

“The media industry is still in the early stages of defining the future of live production workflows and this investment further allows Grass Valley to accelerate our market leadership in support of this industry-wide transition,” says Grass Valley’s Chairman and CEO, Louis Hernandez Jr. “With our surging performance from 2023, and now a stronger balance sheet, we intend to accelerate innovation across our entire portfolio, most notably in the AMPP ecosystem, as we begin to scale deployments across our global customer base.”

As media companies continue to navigate the disruptive forces impacting their businesses, they face mounting challenges to deliver operational efficiencies across the media supply chain. Grass Valley is helping to lead the future of live production solutions by enabling streamlined workflows through the Grass Valley Media Universe, which includes the AMPP open ecosystem delivering significant advantages with flexibility across on-prem, hybrid or cloud native deployment models. By completing this refinancing, Grass Valley will now accelerate its investment across the combined GVMU integrated hardware and software solutions, enabled by AMPP, further extending its leadership across live, networking, content production, and playout workflows.

“We are excited to partner with Grass Valley and its management team on this transaction,” says Peter Ma, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley Private Credit. “The flexibility embedded within our senior debt investment along with the Company’s leading market position, comprehensive product portfolio and positive operating momentum position the business for significant future success.”

Morgan Stanley Private Credit’s investment in Grass Valley was led by Managing Director Peter Ma, Executive Director Griffin Coakley and Vice President Chris Brown.