As I understand it, Textron took a write down of $30-$40m because the fair market value of the asset (arctic cat as a business) is below the cost that the business will generate at the time of sale. In declaring the write down, they identified the loss as associated with inventory, typically this will be inventory that was carried (old parts) which no buyer is going to pay you for. From a buyers perspective, they are buying the go-forward business operations and they see the old inventory and backlog of old contractual commitments as neutral or negative value. That isn't eating debt, its the opposite, it is basically stating that they carried that backlog of inventory as value (likely leveraged) in the books but they aren't going to get paid for it because it was used on the service side of the business, not new sales which is the only thing the buyer is going to find interesting. e.g. an active company (like CFMoto) would only be interested in the brand and the new product sales. A private equity buyer would take the same position while quietly adding up how much they could liquidate the inventory for. Either way, it was value that could not be realized, hence the write down. Maybe they ate the debt in the restructuring costs already why do that, companies aren't allergic to debt.