Avaya completes reorganisation and leaves Chapter 11

The company has been 'debt restructuring' for almost a year

11 months after it first declared bankruptcy, communications giant Avaya has completed its reorganisation and left Chapter 11.

The reason given for the original filing was ‘restructuring', and Avaya announced its new Board last month. New CEO and president Jim Chirico said that the company has "a significantly strengthened balance sheet" compared to last year, with reserves of more than $300 million.

"We have the flexibility we need to invest in the large and growing contact centre and unified communications markets as we complete our transformation to a software, services, and cloud solutions provider," he added.

Back in January, Avaya said that the $725 million in debtor-in-possession financing, via Citibank, would be enough to minimise disruption and continue business operations. It did, however, have to sell part of its business.

Prior to its Chapter 11 filing, Avaya also operated in the networking space. However, it sold that business to Extreme Networks earlier this year, at the time saying that the move would enable it to refocus its efforts on its core unified communications and contact centre arms (handily ignoring the fact that it tried to sell its contact centre business to Genesys in 2016, with no success).

The company is now aiming to fulfil the requirements to get itself relisted on the New York Stock Exchange. It expects to have approximately 110 million shares outstanding on emergence, and has reduced its prior debt load by $3 billion.

Avaya was spun off from Lucent Technologies in the late ‘90s, going private after an $8.2 billion takeover through Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group. It moved into networking after its acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Solutions in 2009.