NEW YORK (S&P Global Ratings) June 27, 2019--S&P Global Ratings today said that despite Carnival Corp.'s (A-/Stable/A-2) recent lowering of its net revenue yield and earnings per share (EPS) guidance for 2019, we believe the company has sufficient leverage capacity to weather temporary modest operating weakness this year and maintain its adjusted leverage under our 2.5x downgrade threshold through 2020. However, we believe it's likely that Carnival's fiscal-year-end 2019 operating lease and port commitment adjusted debt to EBITDA could increase closer to 2.5x from the low-2x area as of May 31, 2019. Our expectation for weak year-end leverage closer to our downgrade threshold is largely due to incremental debt that we already factored into our base-case forecast, which the company
