News content

The marketing of French oil company Total’s £250m seven year bond issue on Tuesday was the second attempt in recent months to reconfigure the way investors are sold bond deals. The first attempt by Vodafone, in July, struggled to gain support euro investors. However, the response to the Total deal suggests that approach could be replicated, at least in sterling. Nigel Owen reports.

The Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) said it is working with Hong Kong’s stock exchange to launch Green Bond Connect, an initiative to help Bond Connect investors identify Chinese bonds that meet international green standards. But market participants are divided on whether such an initiative is necessary. Noah Sin reports.

As expected, no euro issuers were tempted to compete with the European Central Bank meeting on Thursday, however British Land took the opportunity to bring its first senior bond since 2006.

Bouyed by the success of the four deals that priced on Tuesday, three issuers launched deals in the corporate bond market on Wednesday. While deal sizes remain at the smaller end of what is considered a benchmark, longer tenors from triple-B rated corporates are offering investors more yield.

Beijing Hyundai Motor Group is gearing up for a Rmb3.5bn ($535.9m) deal in China’s asset-backed securitization market, just over three months after completing a transaction of the same size.

Red chip property developer Joy City has hit the Panda bond market for the first time, raising Rmb1bn ($153.1m) from a three year bond on September 5. Although the deal was small in size, it caught the attention of some Bond Connect investors thanks to the issuer’s reputation.

Daimler’s China expansion keeps the issuer coming back for more onshore funding, with the automaker pricing a Panda private placement less than four months after its previous outing.

China’s Foreign Economic Cooperation Office (FECO) of the Ministry of Environmental Protection and a group of financial industry bodies in China have published a set of guidelines on controlling environmental risk for Chinese overseas investment.

The Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX) is in talks with Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) to launch a Green Bond Connect, an initiative to help Bond Connect investors identify Chinese bonds that meet the international standards of green investments, Sean Kidney, CEO at CBI, told GlobalRMB in Beijing.

Monday’s combination of heightened worries over North Korea and the Labor Day holiday in the US saw only one new issue in the European corporate bond market. However, with no new developments from the Korean peninsula overnight, five issuers decided to push ahead with trades on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Telefonica printed the largest single tranche of the day, 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 printed with a single digit new issue premium.

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.