Asia Pacific

Indonesia made a successful debut in its domestic Islamic bond market last Friday, pricing a Rph4.7tr ($503m) bond split between seven and 10 year tranches.

The chairman of Korea’s Financial Services Commission poured cold water on any plans the Korea Development Bank may have had to acquire a stake in Lehman Brothers this week, arguing that a state-owned bank, albeit one which is due to be privatised, should not take such risks.

Reduced bank funding options, a growing reliance on retail deposits, and a frozen secondary real estate market. Sound familiar? No, it’s not the US, but Kazakhstan. But while covered bonds are coming to the fore in the States and being taken up in CIS countries such as the Ukraine, the market’s direction in Kazakhstan is less clear.

Indonesia made a successful debut in the Islamic bond market on Friday, pricing a Rph4.7tr ($503m) bond split between seven and ten year tranches. The long-awaited domestic deal allows the government to tap Islamic investors for the first time in the world's most populated Muslim nation, and serves as a precursor to the sovereign's planned debut in the global sukuk market, set for later this year.

Export-Import Bank of China (Chexim) this week highlighted the continued strength of demand for renminbi-denominated bonds among Hong Kong investors, when it sold Rmb3bn ($428m) of three year notes on Wednesday.

Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp (OCBC) is preparing its second tier one issue in the Singapore dollar market, offering a S$1bn ($711m) hybrid deal to institutional, private and retail investors at an impressively tight spread.

Cargill, the US food and commodities trading company, is meeting investors in Thailand this week ahead of a planned September bond sale.