Asia Pacific

In this round-up, the World Trade Organization rules that additional tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on some Chinese goods in 2018 breached international trade regulations, ByteDance makes progress on the sale of TikTok in the US, and Hong Kong asks Washington to drop its demand for the city’s exports to be labelled as ‘made in China’.

In this round-up, the recovery of the Chinese economy picks up pace, the country’s micro loan companies face stricter regulations, and the trading hours of bonds in the interbank market have been extended to draw more international demand.

Neusoft Education Technology, a Chinese private higher education provider, hit the road with its Hong Kong IPO this week, aiming to raise HK$1.04bn ($133.8m).

Beijing Enterprises Holdings took €500m from its maiden green bond on Thursday, helped by support from the bookrunners on the deal.

Instant noodle maker Tingyi (Cayman Islands) Holding Corp was back with a $500m deal on Thursday after an eight-year hiatus from the dollar bond market.

Warburg Pincus-backed Computer Age Management Services, an Indian finance-focused technology firm, is set to launch its IPO of up to Rp22.4bn ($305.2m).

Bond sales from Chinese issuers continued unabated on Thursday despite heavy supply in the first half of the week, with firms raising a combined $1.1bn from the debt market.

Formosa Plastics Corp is seeking a $2bn loan that bankers expect to be priced at a record low for borrowers from Taiwan, setting a benchmark for future transactions.

If UBS’s reported exploration of a merger with Credit Suisse actually leads to a tie-up at some point, it would create a formidable European investment bank.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, one of the world's largest owners of shopping malls, launched a €9bn-plus turnaround plan on Thursday, which includes a €3.5bn rights issue. The aim of is to reduce its leverage to help it withstand the Covid-19 pandemic.

The People’s Bank of China has started to allow banks seeking quotas to sell non-performing loan securitizations to shift from the old approval-based system to a registration-based system, onshore bankers told GlobalCapital China this week. The reform is set to speed up the pre-issuance phase and ease banks’ increasing pressure to dispose of bad loans.

Big Hit Entertainment, the label behind hugely popular K-pop boy band BTS, this week launched bookbuilding for an IPO that will be worth as much as W962.6bn ($818.4m). The company is the latest to ride a wave of demand sweeping the country’s stock market, causing an over-heating that is pushing prices dangerously high, said bankers. Jonathan Breen reports.