Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)

Turkey’s Yapi Kredi, Russia’s Credit Bank of Moscow and Banque Ouest Africaine de Banque Ouest Africaine de Développement have all approached investors this week to sound out interest in hard currency bonds.

InPost, the Polish provider of postal lockers, has launched an IPO on the Amsterdam stock exchange, seeking to build on the momentum of compatriot e-commerce companies in equity capital markets, as exemplified by Allegro's IPO last year.

Komerční banka sold the Czech Republic’s first euro denominated benchmark covered bond on Wednesday, landing flat to the curve of its Slovakian neighbours despite the European Central Bank’s absence from the book.

Russia’s Sovcombank has entered the ESG loan market for the first time, raising a $350m syndicated loan. An increasing number of Russian corporates are turning to the green financing sector as a way to diversify funding.

A burst of mandates on Monday confirmed what many market participants had expected: a rise in emerging market corporate bond supply.

Raiffeisen Bank International’s clients are increasingly looking to achieve more sustainable, fairer and more transparent ways of doing business. In this context, RBI maintains a comprehensive dialogue with an ever-increasing pool of clients on sustainable finance, e.g. bonds, loans and Schuldscheine. We focus our attention not only on “green”, but also cover sustainability-linked instruments, a rapidly growing area in the sustainable finance universe.

Rating: A3/AA-/A

The Industrial Development Bank of Turkey, Turkiye Sinai Kalkinma Bankasi (TSKB), has launched its debut sustainable bond, the latest in a string of Turkish bank issuers that have forayed into the ESG financing market over the last year.

Komerční banka (KB), a partially owned subsidiary of Société Générale, has mandated leads for the first fully distributed euro benchmark covered bond from the Czech Republic, paving the way for other major lenders to follow suit.

The Republic of Slovenia has repeated its 2020 feat of being the first sovereign issuer in CEEMEA to launch a bond by coming to the market with a mandate on Tuesday. Despite the apparent rush for bond funding, however, many believe that EU funding will provide some of what CEE countries would otherwise have taken from public bond markets.

Investor demand for higher yielding covered bonds from Central and Eastern Europe will likely outpace relatively moderate supply by a considerable amount. And with a wide range of debut issuers in a considerable number of new jurisdictions expected to surface, the outlook is very promising.

Equity investors have begun in recent months to allocate capital away from some of the high growth firms which dominated equity capital market supply this year to more cyclical companies that are set to benefit when economies reopen from Covid-19 lockdowns. They are also looking to buy into emerging markets, predicting rising equity valuations in places like Russia and some parts of Latin America.