Nomura

South Korea’s KT Corp is preparing for a dollar bond in the second half of the year, having selected four banks to work on the trade.

Cemex Holdings Philippines has begun gauging investor interest in its IPO, which could raise up to $500m, sources close to the deal told GlobalCapital Asia.

The wave of rights issues and capital raisings in the market this summer is so far going smoothly, with good news this week for Banco Popular Español, as its shares and rights perked up in trading.

Convertible investors in Europe gobbled up an unusually large deal on Wednesday from a Japanese issuer, Kansai Paint Co, which raised ¥100bn with a two tranche structure, of which one tranche appealed more to hedge funds and the other to outright investors.

Banca Popolare di Milano and Banco Sabadell issued covered bonds which, despite their negligible new issue concessions, met with exceptionally strong demand.

After a slow start to the week, a torrent of covered bonds was priced on Wednesday and Thursday, as issuers sought to move quickly in case the market succumbs to one of many potential political risks it faces this month.

Verisure, the B2/B rated Swedish alarms systems company, had accelerated commitments due at 3pm on Thursday for its €1.02bn term loan ‘B’.

Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp has wrapped up a landmark $8.9bn sell-down in Alibaba Group Holdings through a combination of five separate transactions, including raising $5.5bn via the sale of mandatory exchangeable trust securities (METS). The size of the METS is impressive, making it the largest equity-linked deal globally since 2010, but it also came with a structure almost never seen before in Asia. Jonathan Breen reports.

Nomura is setting up an office in Singapore to provide advisory services for funding infrastructure projects in Asia, focusing initially on southeast Asian countries.

International institutional investors showed no signs of ‘Brexit’ jitters this week as the last of the sovereign's syndication before the European Union referendum drew a record book of more than £15bn.

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The Japanese bank has been ruthless in rooting out underperformance in its international operations but its withdrawal from ECM was overdue, writes David Rothnie