Morgan Stanley

Standard & Poor’s astonished the equity-linked bond market on Wednesday evening by stripping the equity credit from Vodafone’s £2.9bn mandatory convertibles, issued in February, only a month after assigning the credit. The change knocks away one advantage of the deal for Vodafone and may damage banks’ hopes of replicating it.

Deutsche Post, the German courier, issued a €1.25bn dual tranche bond on Wednesday, winning a large order book as investors hurled money at the market.

Two pre-IPO investors in IMAX China have raised HK$940bn ($121.2m) after offloading just under half of their holdings in the company. But in an unusual approach, the shareholders executed the sale nearly three weeks before their original lock-up periods were set to expire.

The bookbuild for the initial public offering of Senvion was completed a day early, on Monday evening, and resulted in a price near the bottom of an already much lowered price range.

Low profitability remains the main risk for euro area banks, according to the European Central Bank’s annual report on banking supervision, and with little sign of revenues rising in 2016, more and more financial institutions are turning to technology to cut costs.

The private equity owners of German wind turbine maker Senvion have grudgingly relaunched its Frankfurt IPO, just five days after pulling it on low demand. The new deal is half the size of the earlier one, and implies a valuation €300m lower.

HeidelbergCement issued a benchmark high yield bond on Monday that was increased to €1bn and nearly three times oversubscribed.

South Korea’s Shinhan Bank made a strong impression on bank capital investors this week, pricing a 10 year bullet tier two. Some of the credit for the transaction’s success goes to the fundamental strength of the issuer and the investor-friendly structure of the bond, but market participants say Shinhan’s willingness to pay up also deserves kudos.

Chinese e-commerce group Alibaba is understood to have seen a good turnout for a roadshow held on Thursday for its $3bn syndicated loan. Bankers reckon the pricing and the potential use of proceeds contributed to the appeal.

Investment banking fees are lower as a proportion of GDP than at any time since 1995, excluding the crisis years, according to the annual Oliver Wyman/Morgan Stanley study of wholesale banking and markets.

Senvion, the German wind turbine maker, pulled its €700m IPO on Wednesday morning, after a difficult bookbuild that failed to deliver a covered book.

GlobalCapital announces the results of its Equity Capital Markets Awards for 2015, following our inaugural ECM Awards Dinner, in London on March 16.