Agreement Ups Apria’s Borrowing Capacity

Lake Forest, Calif.

Home respiratory provider Apria Healthcare Group has entered into a five-year revolving credit agreement with a syndicate of banks led by Bank of America and The Bank of Nova Scotia, effectively increasing the company’s overall borrowing capacity to $500 million.

According to Apria CFO Amin Khalifa, the agreement “gives us the flexibility to be as aggressive as we need to be regarding acquisitions, among other things,” including internal investments. Khalifa explained that the company did not enter the credit agreement “specifically for acquisition reasons. We need to be opportunistic,” he said. “As CFO, one of the things I always do is allow the company to have some flexibility at the lowest costs.

“When the pricing is what we think is reasonable, and there are top quality acquisitions available, we’ll be looking at them,” Khalifa continued. But some acquisitions the industry has seen during the past year have involved “prices we thought were in the stratosphere,” he said.

Within the company’s third-quarter earnings summary released in October, Apria said it had acquired a record number of businesses in 2004, adding six companies in the third quarter alone.

With annual revenue of $1.4 billion, Apria provides home respiratory therapy, home infusion therapy and HME through more than 475 branches in all 50 states.