Coffee retailer Starbucks Corp. intends to issue about $1.6 billion of senior unsecured notes. We understand the company will use the net proceeds for general corporate purposes including share repurchases. The debt issuance is in line with the company's stated strategy to issue additional debt to fund stock buybacks, and we expect it to balance shareholder returns with the execution of a successful business strategy that includes store growth and mobile efforts. We are assigning our 'A-' issue-level rating to the proposed notes. All of our existing ratings on Starbucks are unchanged, including the 'A-' corporate credit rating. The stable outlook reflects our view that Starbucks will maintain financial metrics in line with our pro forma estimates of less than
