Germany

Forth Ports, the port operator with headquarters in Edinburgh, is marketing prospective US private placements this week.

UniCredit’s German subsidiary, HVB, has mandated leads for the first dollar covered bond in its 150 year history reflecting a preference to avoid issuing a negative yielding euro benchmark.

A corner of Europe’s capital markets that up to now has offered both stability and growth — German housing companies — has been thrown into turmoil by a five year rent freeze on all housing, proposed by the State of Berlin, write Silas Brown, Aidan Gregory and Jon Hay.

Agrana, a food producer headquartered in Vienna, is marketing a Schuldschein where its floating notes are some 20bp inside the fixed note offering. Two market participants said they had never seen this before.

Infineon Technologies, the German semiconductor maker, has raised €1.54bn of fresh equity to finance its takeover of Cypress Semiconductor, an American rival, via an accelerated bookbuild.

One of Deutsche Bank’s most senior equity capital markets bankers has resigned after nearly 15 years at the bank to join a rival. The move comes amid reports that Deutsche Bank is preparing to make deep cuts to its equities trading business outside of continental Europe.

FRANKFURT PRIVATE DEBT ROUNDTABLE The Schuldschein market has kept up its momentum across Europe and elsewhere, but two regions have been curiously quiet. Iberia and Italy have implied investment grade borrowers well suited to the market, yet only a few have been tempted to use it. Are there barriers to entry and how can they be overcome?

Flushed with years of popularity in Germany and its neighbouring countries, Schuldschein arrangers have begun to look across the globe for new borrowers to tempt to the market. This year has brought the first transaction from India, and many say Reliance Industries’ success may spur more non-European entities to target the Schuldschein investors. Silas Brown reports.

VIENNA PRIVATE DEBT ROUNDTABLE The Schuldschein market is widening its circle of issuers and investors. It is now a natural choice for Austrian companies wanting to complement bank funding, but not necessarily big enough to issue public bonds.

The Schuldschein market has become a hotbed of technological innovation over the past 12 months, with as many as 11 digital platforms cropping up, claiming to have solutions to the instrument’s age-old, if slightly charming, inefficiencies. Silas Brown looks into the secrets to a digital platform’s success.

Dutch agency BNG via DZ Bank has placed the first ‘smart n-bond’, a Namensschuldverschreibung (NSV) issued through digital platform European private placement facility (eppf). Participants hailed this transaction as a step towards a functioning pan-European private placement market.

Global Fashion Group, the emerging markets-focused online fashion retailer, has opened the books for its €300m IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange with a price range that pitches the company at a healthy discount to its closest peers Asos and Zalando.