Europe

French property company Icade printed its first green bond on Monday, on a day when no other corporates ventured into the bond market. Having the full attention of investors allowed the issuer to increase the deal to €600m and price 20bp tighter than initial price thoughts.

On Tuesday, pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline returned to the corporate bond market for the first time since November 2014, and its rarity value contributed to combined order books of over €5.5bn for the triple tranche deal.

Capital Stage, the German renewable energy company, launched its first convertible bond on Wednesday, raising €97.3m. The deal came from a different corner of the CB world from the Qiagen transaction on the same day: it was a hybrid deal, structured to receive equity credit under IFRS.

The European high yield bond market returned from its summer break to €3bn of new bond offerings this week, including notes from Delaware’s Kronos International and California’s Equinix.

Agence Française de Développement stormed back into the dollar market on Thursday, printing its largest trade in the currency in six years with a comfortable oversubscription and tightened pricing. The deal put to rest AFD’s pulled dollar trade in February, said bankers.

The UK this week once again broke its record order book, with bankers suggesting the huge demand may have been down to investors taking their last chance for ultralong sovereign sterling paper for some time.

On Tuesday, German car manufacturer Daimler converted a couple of reverse enquiries into an order book of around €600m, as investors showed renewed appetite for short dated fixed rate corporate bonds.

The sterling market is on fire for SSA borrowers. Attractive conditions and investors with cash to deploy have come together to produce some of the market’s most impressive deals of the year, with more in the pipeline.

Sean Weissenberger has moved to Citi to run EMEA chemicals investment banking.

Telefónica printed the largest single tranche of the day on Tuesday, with a €1.25bn deal with a January 2028 maturity. Despite competing with three other corporate bond deals in the euro market, the deal built a €3bn order book and was printed with a single digit new issue premium.

September’s expected busy calendar of equity-linked issues in Europe made further progress this week, when Qiagen and Capital Stage sold unusually structured bonds, both of which achieved strong books and priced within their ranges — with no sign of market congestion yet.

The European high yield bond market has suffered two years of falling primary issuance but a busy September will provide the impetus for a return to growth. However, there are also concerns about weakening investor protection.