Engineering and defence giant Babcock International has paid back more than £140million of debt after it bought the owner of Bond Aviation this year.
In an update to investors, Babcocks said “good progress” has been made in refinancing the bond and credit facility debt behind Avincis Group, which it snapped up from Investindustrial in a £1.6billion deal in March.
The FTSE-100 industrial group spent £920million to buy the aviation group, as well as taking on £705million of net debt. The deal completed in May.
The group is expected to repay a further £373million to bond investors in August, it said.
Avincis, which operates as Bond Aviation in the UK, has boosted the firm’s bid pipeline by £1billion to £16billion.
The total group order book has increased to £13.5billion with the inclusion of the Avincis book, which it said was valued at about £2billion at the end of June.
Recent successful bids for Bond included £300million total contract awards, including a £50million, seven year contract with Maersk to provide crew change services for its North Sea oil installations.
Babcock said it was currently undertaking a review of the company’s helicopter fleet in a bid to “optimise cost and efficiency”.
The firm, which runs the Rosyth dockyard, added that it had around £3billion of contracts still at preferred bidder stage within its pipeline which are expected to transfer to the order book on contract signature during the first half of the year.
The company, which was presenting an update to investors at an annual general meeting, said its 2014/15 financial year had started well.
“Activity levels remain high and trading is in line with our expectations,” it said.