REG S: The bank faces an embarrassing resignation letter

The arrival of the first double-digit coupon in 10 months has underlined the growing hunger for risky Asian credit in the US dollar market. Chinese developer KWG Property on Thursday priced a US$400m bond to yield 13.5%, becoming the first issuer in Asia outside Japan and Australia to offer a yield of more than 10% since Sino-Ocean Land launched a 10.25% perpetual last May. It followed a larger deal from better-known Agile Property three days earlier that offered 9.9%, reinforcing the return of a sector that had been frozen out of the...

Source: Reuters/Punit Paranjpe People walk in the Wipro campus in Bangalore. India’s share-auction mechanism is again under fire after an offering of shares in IT services firm Wipro closed well undersubscribed. After a disastrous placement of state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp stock two weeks earlier that was blamed on poor pricing, Wipro’s failure highlighted a number of technical and logistical problems with the “offer-for-sale” structure. Market sources had expected the placement to be a breeze, as the block on offer represented only a 1...

Ford Motor has priced its first Dim Sum bond after an overwhelming response from investors. The US carmaker attracted orders totalling Rmb10bn (US$1.56bn) from 120 accounts for its offshore renminbi bond, far exceeding the rumoured target of Rmb500m–Rmb750m. The response allowed Ford to raise Rmb1bn at a lower cost than first mooted, further reinforcing the appeal of the expanding Dim Sum market. The three-year deal is the first junk-rated bond from a non-Chinese company in the offshore renminbi market, coming as more overseas firms raise funds...

Source: Reuters/Bobby Yip The company logo of Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd (HKEx) is displayed outside its exhibition hall in Hong Kong. Haitong Securities has revived its US$1.5bn Hong Kong IPO, which will provide a good gauge of other companies’ chances of coming to market. On completion, it will become the largest Hong Kong IPO this year and will mark the first successful redemption among the many listing candidates that scrapped their deals last year. Haitong, China’s second-largest brokerage, has been waiting for a new issuance...

A pair of unusual convertible bonds last week highlighted the difficulties of finding an accurate price in Asia’s fast-improving equity-linked market. Property developer China Overseas Grand Oceans Group turned to credit enhancement to reduce its cost of funding, but an exchangeable bond from Khazanah Nasional the following day quickly exposed how much it had overpaid for its deal. China Overseas launched a five-year put three CB on March 13 backed with a standby letter of credit from DBS Bank, also joint bookrunner alongside BOC International...

State-owned Development Bank of Mongolia drew orders totalling US$6.25bn ahead of last week’s US$580m debut bond. The order size points to the depth of demand for exposure to the frontier market and sends a strong message to potential issuers in the resource-rich nation. The five-year Reg S bond attracted over 300 investors and priced at par to yield 5.75%, well inside the initial guidance of 6.00%–6.25%. That bodes well for Mongolian Mining Corp, which is planning a global bond and has issued a mandate to arrange investor meetings. DBM’s debut...

Source: Reuters/Bazuki Muhammad Young Malaysians eat at a KFC Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. Four M&A announcements have put Malaysia back on the radar for Asia’s loan bankers with the promise of lucrative financing mandates. The four deals, however, come as a test of the international bank market’s ability to compete with abundant ringgit liquidity and an attractive domestic bond market. Early indications suggest the offshore market is losing out. Malaysian banks are highly liquid in ringgit and each major domestic lender can hold billions of...

India’s equity-linked market, already under pressure from the impending deluge of redemptions this year, faces more difficulties as investors turn their backs on mid-cap companies hoping to issue. “The investor base is only keen on really strong credits,” said one equity-linked head. “Anything in the Indian mid-cap area is tough.” The last widely marketed Indian offshore CBs from mid-sized companies were a US$75m paper from Shiv-Vani Oil & Gas Exploration Services in July 2010, and US$60m issues from Prakash Industries and Core Projects a month...

State-owned China Cinda Asset Management Corp has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with four investors, paving the way for its jumbo IPO, expected to be worth billions of dollars. Cinda, one of the “Big Four” asset-management companies in China, has brought in Citic Capital, China’s National Social Security Fund, Standard Chartered and UBS as strategic investors. The move is significant because it symbolises that the AMC is taking a big step forward to becoming a market-oriented and profit-making enterprise. It also places a price tag...

Indonesian investors are starting to prefer corporate bond investments to government debt after yields dropped to record lows following the sovereign’s promotion to investment-grade status. Domestic funds have already started increasing their allocations towards the less-crowded corporate debt market, paving the way for local companies to lock in attractive funding costs. “Mutual funds are increasing their limits for corporate bonds and pension funds are moving away from time deposits to corporate debt,” said a Jakarta-based banker. At the same...

Vietnam Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Industry and Trade (VietinBank) is going on a global roadshow with Barclays and HSBC from Monday. VietinBank, the country’s largest partly private lender in terms of assets, will kick-off meetings in Singapore before moving on to Hong Kong on Tuesday and London on Wednesday. It will then go to the US, meeting accounts in Boston on Thursday, New York on Friday and San Francisco the following Monday. A RegS/144a is expected to be priced thereafter. The size and structure of the deal are still open for...

Shriram Transport Finance has closed a commercial vehicle loans-backed ABS of Rs1.705bn (US$34m). The deal, executed in the pass-through certificate form, is split into series A notes of about Rs1.58bn, expected to get an AAA rating from Fitch, with maturity scheduled for February 2017. The deal also has a Rs126.3m second-loss credit facility. rated BBB. The credit enhancements on the two tranches are 13% and 5%, respectively. Mizuho Corporate subscribed to the series A PTCs at 9.55%. The pay-in was last Wednesday. The pool comprises 7,845...