Goldman Sachs

Bankers hope 2017 will prove a more vibrant year for Russian IPOs, after the country's stockmarket was one of Europe's best performers last year and Western investors are thawing towards it.

Typically an early mover in the race to fund, Turkey raised $2bn on Wednesday with an SEC-registered note maturing March 2027, a third of the total $6bn it plans to raise this year. But the sovereign has plenty of hurdles ahead, writes Virginia Furness.

The Export-Import Bank of Korea (Kexim) raised $1.5bn Wednesday across three and five year tranches, less than a week after the Republic of Korea reopened the Asian sovereign market with a $1bn 10 year deal.

One of the busiest days ever in the public sector dollar market ended with five issuers sitting on deals printed at the top end of their size targets and with pricing tightened from initial thoughts. Another borrower is already out for Thursday business and bankers predict that conditions are so “incredible” that deal flow will stay healthy into next week — no matter what policy statements incoming US president Donald Trump makes at his inauguration on Friday.

Xella, the German building materials maker, held a bank meeting on Thursday morning in London for the first large buyout of the year so far, as it markets €1.3bn of loans backing its buyout by US private equity house Lone Star.

Every shade of corporate bond has been able to find a home with euro investors this week, despite investors’ mutterings about overly zealous spread tightening and continued scepticism about the long end.

Shares in Banco Comercial Português, the Portuguese bank, closed 15% higher on Tuesday after they began trading ex-rights ahead of its €1.33bn rights issue to strengthen its capital buffers and repay contingent convertible bonds owned by the Portuguese government.

The pipeline for euro issuance is filling up once again as the European Investment Bank looks to raise funds at 10 years, although a deal from KfW on Tuesday appeared to struggle to reach €1bn.

German healthcare group Fresenius brought euro corporate bond investors their first jumbo deal of the year on Tuesday as it financed its acquisition of Spanish hospital operator QuironSalud.

A quartet of public sector borrowers are set to cram into the front end of the dollar curve on Wednesday, as bankers outlined a triple whammy of factors driving the squeeze.

Douglas, the German retailer, launched a refinancing of a €1.37bn seven year term loan ‘B’ on Tuesday, as the firm comes out of soft call protection from its last repricing in mid-2016.

Detsky Mir, the Russian children’s goods retailer, has announced its intention to float on the Moscow Exchange, more than two years after shelving plans to go public when Western sanctions were imposed on some Russian entities after the country's annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Russia suffered a recession.