Asia Pacific

A new $300m loan for Indian Oil Corp (IOC) has made market participants sit up and take notice, as the 68bp margin on offer is the lowest for a five year syndicated Indian deal in nearly a decade. While bankers are keen to see the size and sources of demand for the benchmark setting trade, there is wide expectation that the borrower will get away with it. Shruti Chaturvedi reports.

China Development Bank jumped on the floating rate note (FRN) bandwagon this week, bagging $3bn equivalent and adding its name to a list of issuers that recently sold bonds in the format. With demand rather than supply driving deals, and with interest rate hikes looming, the stage is nicely set for more FRN trades, writes Addison Gong.

Indonesian telecom infrastructure provider Tower Bersama Infrastructure has approached its relationship banks for borrowings worth $500m.

UBS’s co-head of global capital markets for Australasia Dane FitzGibbon is leaving the bank, according to sources close to the move.

Crime doesn’t pay — this mantra ought to be drilled into the minds of bankers by now. But as I found to my amusement this week, loose morals in finance are far from a thing of the past.

Credit Suisse has made Ali Naqvi head of its Asia Pacific global markets division, less than a year after the team went through a restructuring.

Singapore-based agricultural and commodities firm Olam International added variety to the debt market this week with a $300m bond that had an unusual tenor, as analysts were left divided over the final pricing.

Two firms stole the headlines in the Panda bond market this week, with Shimao Property Holdings filing for a new programme and China Orient Asset Management (International) Holdings’ cancelling its planned outing.

Hangzhou Mi Lu Technology Co, which owns Chinese social media platform kktv5.com, is laying the groundwork for a Hong Kong IPO this year, according to bankers close to the matter.

The heat is on for IPOs in south-east Asia, with banks staging charm offensives towards investors during pre-marketing.

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange is set to pull out all the stops to woo energy giant Saudi Aramco to list on the bourse, with its chief executive describing it as a “match made in heaven” this week. But the HKEX has even bigger ambitions — to move from an exchange dominated by Chinese companies to one with foreign issuers, writes Jonathan Breen.

Events, including a rise in the probability of a March interest rate hike and US President Donald Trump’s speech to Congress, did not hold investors back from jumping into deals from Grand China Air, China Aircraft Leasing Group (CALC) and Hong Kong Express Airways (HK Express) on Tuesday.