Greeley’s Pilgrim’s Pride offers $500M in unsecured notes

GREELEY — Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. (Nasdaq: PPC) is offering $500 million in 10-year unsecured notes to qualified institutional buyers, according to documents filed Wednesday with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.

In a media statement issued Wednesday, the company said it intends to apply $350 million of the sale’s proceeds toward debt payments, with the balance to be used for “general corporate purposes.”

The Greeley-based chicken processor employs about 35,500 people and operates chicken processing plants and prepared-foods facilities in 12 states, Puerto Rico and Mexico. Its primary distribution is through retailers and food-service distributors. Brazilian meatpacker JBS S.A. (Bovespa: JBSS3) owns 75 percent of Pilgrim’s Pride shares. JBS, which also operates a beef processing plant in Greeley, absorbed Pilgrim’s Pride in 2010 after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2009 during the economic recession.

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Shares of Pilgrim’s Pride were selling for $28.20 at midday after opening 41 cents higher, Last month, the company issued a special $5.77-per-share cash dividend totaling $1.5 billion to shareholders of record as of Jan. 30. The company issued the dividend following improvements in its capital structure.