How worried should we be about Interserve's woes?

"We're not the next Carillion (Frankfurt: 924047 - news) ".

That's the message that every outsourcing company has repeated, until blue in the face, since the downfall of Carillion in January this year.

The likes of Mitie Group (Other OTC: MITFF - news) and Capita (LSE: CPI.L - news) have largely succeeded in convincing shareholders and, just as crucially, Whitehall - central and local government being big customers of the outsourcing sector - that they are entirely different beasts from the doomed company.

Yet there have been signs that lenders to companies in the sector have become increasingly squeamish about their exposure to it.

Accordingly, another outsourcing and construction services specialist, Kier Group (LSE: KIE.L - news) , last month announced plans to tap shareholders for £264m in a bid to bolster its balance sheet, admitting it had been driven to taking action in response to "tighter credit markets".

On Monday, after days of speculation, Interserve (Frankfurt: 860509 - news) said it is also going to have to undergo a financial restructuring .

Unfortunately for the Birmingham-based company, its situation is too precarious for it to be able to pass the hat around its shareholders, as Kier is doing.

Its net debt, which stood at £615m at the end of June and which is expected to be between £625m-£650m by the end of the year, is too high to be wiped out by its shareholders.

Accordingly, the company - as Sky (Frankfurt: 893517 - news) 's City Editor Mark Kleinman has reported - is hoping to reach an accommodation with its creditors , who will be invited to exchange their debts for new shares in the company.

It means that existing investors, including the likes of Standard Life (LSE: SL.L - news) , Legal & General (LSE: LGEN.L - news) and DWS, will see their shareholdings wiped out.

Most of them will have already come to terms with that, with Interserve's stock market valuation - which stood at £1bn just four years ago - today standing at less than £20m, the shares having lost more than 80% of their value this year.

Interserve says the restructuring will aim to reduce its debts to approximately one and a half times earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (ebidta).

With (Other OTC: WWTH - news) brokers forecasting ebitda (another term for core earnings) to be around £131m this year, that means the company is aiming to reduce its debts from around £650m to £196.5m in this restructuring.

The company finds itself in this plight largely because, under its previous management, it expanded into building six incinerator plants that produce energy from waste . These ran over-budget and behind schedule and led to Interserve incurring a hit of £160m in fines and losses in 2016 alone.

Adding to this has been the fact that like some other outsourcing companies, notably Carillion, some of its other contracts have turned out to be loss-making.

So does this mean that, as the Unite union has today asserted, Interserve is "Carillion mark two"?

Not necessarily. Stephen Rawlinson, an analyst who follows the company, told the Financial Times today that Interserve's financial position is actually in worse shape than Carillion's before it collapsed.

But he added: "In our view, Interserve got lucky as it followed Carillion, and nobody wants to go through that liquidation again."

That collapse caused immense pain not only to Carillion's employees but also to many of its contractors.

Carillion did not go into administration, enabling it to keep trading while buyers were found for various parts of its businesses, because it had next to no assets that could be sold by administrators.

Instead, it went into a liquidation process, which maximised losses for those owed money by the company. Accordingly, there has been speculation in recent weeks that contractors have been avoiding doing business with Interserve, making its difficulties more acute.

So if the company's debts can be restructured, it ought to go some way towards restoring confidence.

Among those wishing to avoid a re-run of Carillion's collapse will be government ministers.

The loss of a second major outsourcing company, employing tens of thousands of people, would have been politically devastating as well as creating many hours of work for Whitehall as it sought to reallocate work being done for central government by Interserve to other companies.

Interserve remaining in business also means more competition when future contracts are put out to tender.

In the meantime, Interserve continues to win new work.

Debbie White, who became chief executive in September last year and who is blameless for Interserve's difficulties, announced on Monday it had won a £25m contract to refurbish the Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales.

She (Munich: SOQ.MU - news) was able to point out that the Cabinet Office had "expressed full support for the work we are doing to implement our long term recovery plan".

On that basis, there is good reason to think that this company is not another Carillion, assuming the restructuring can be completed.