[bux93]

The regulatory requirement is there for a reason. Whenever you see a statement like that it means that the accountant they hired is covering their ass so they don't get sued if the company DOES go bankrupt.

Even though the company is paying them, the accountant is saying "whelp, doesn't look like a sure thing to me!"

Their pension fund has assets outstripping its liabilities and they can essentially wind up the fund. Great! Except if the fund's assets suddenly drop in value (e.g. when interest rates go up, and their bonds mark to market value drops, or if the stock market crashes) or if the price of those annuities to be bought goes up (e.g. when interest rates go down, and you need to reserve more money now for payments later). Interest rates dropping is perhaps not inconceivable, with a president tweeting every week about firing the chairman of the Fed if rates aren't dropped? A stock market crash, however short term, is also not inconceivable, especially with so much of the index concentrated in a few tech stocks.

A "going concern" statement like this is worth more that the company's press release disagreeing with it.

[bluecalm]

Or the pension fund has positions marked at given value which aren't updated to current reality (commercial real estate, private equity shares etc.) so they try to off-load it to some poor sucker before it blows up.

[nly]

No, typically what happened is during the low interest rate era of 2007-2020 companies pumped money in to their pensions schemes to try to meet their future employee liabilities (most of which are still way out in the future)

Now that rates have risen across the yield curve the cost of locking in coverage for those liabilities (typically with long duration government bonds) has reduced, leading to a surplus in the pot.

Selling the scheme to the insurance industry while it's in surplus lets them claw some money back and get it off their books forever

They seem late to the party though as rates are coming down. 2023-4 would have been when the iron was hot.