Citi

The crunch is coming. The Middle East loan market has long offered low margins and lashings of liquidity but pricing is widening, just as issuers flock to the market in droves, writes Elly Whittaker.

Unitymedia, the German cable operator, this week priced €420m of senior secured 10 year notes to yield 4.625%, the wide end of price talk.

China Overseas Finance Investment (Cayman) V raised $1.5bn from an extremely popular exchangeable bond on Wednesday, with the order book swelling to twice that amount.

Two Indian healthcare companies closed extremely successful IPOs on Thursday, with Alkem Laboratories and Dr Lal Pathlabs fully covered mid-way through bookbuilding. And with India’s equity capital market buzzing with activity, bankers are telling their clients to seize the day before uncertainty sets in, writes John Loh.

Kuwait petrochemicals firm Equate has delayed signing $6bn of loans until next week because the firm’s board members are still waiting on approvals, said bankers.

Unitymedia, one of Germany’s largest cable operators, launched a €420m senior secured high yield bond today.

Arrangers have not set a closing date for the $1bn loan for the Sultanate of Oman, on which pricing has been widened recently, but bankers hope to close the deal before year end.

Corporate bond bankers are busy, for this time of year. While they are usually up for doing deals, it is clear investors, too, are in no hurry to close their books for the year, but are keen to buy paper, despite the let-down of the European Central Bank’s lukewarm QE boost last week.

China Overseas Finance Investment (Cayman) V has opened books on a $1.2bn equity-linked offering of bonds exchangeable into shares of China Overseas Land & Investments.

India’s Reliance Industries has selected a group of 13 lenders for a $1bn loan that will refinance a borrowing raised in 2010.

Air Liquide and Saipem loans show that bankers and borrowers are not yet slowing down as they seek to tie up remaining bumper deals they launched in a busy fourth quarter.

The Sultanate of Oman has widened the pricing of its $1bn loan by 10bp to encourage banks to lend, after the sovereign was downgraded by Standard & Poor's in November.