South America

Credit Suisse has hired from a European rival to lead its Brazil DCM efforts as it edges up the LatAm bookrunner league tables.

SierraCol Energy, the Carlyle Group-owned spin-off of Occidental Petroleum’s onshore operations in Colombia, sold its inaugural international bond issue on Monday to continue a surge in LatAm high yield issuance — though some bankers felt the underwhelming aftermarket performance of other recent borrowers affected the deal.

StoneCo, the Brazilian financial technology firm, debuted in international bond markets on Friday with a seven year benchmark that it will partially use to finance an investment in digital bank Banco Inter.

Frontera Energy on Thursday became the latest Latin America oil and gas company to take advantage of strong oil prices to tap bond markets, with the company — which operates mostly in Colombia — increasing the size of a five year deal and attracting a broad range of investors.

Brazilian airline Azul on Thursday sold the first triple-C rated new issue from Latin America since the coronavirus pandemic began, pricing a five year bond inside guidance to as investors swarm all over the region’s riskier credits.

The nascent sustainability-linked bond (SLB) faced a big test this week with deals from the oil, power and steel sectors, and most notably from Brazil meat processor, JBS. But if the enthusiastic reception to the deals suggested the market passed with flying colours, there were calls for more scrutiny of the relevance of KPIs if the SLB label is to mean anything. Oliver West reports.

Latin American supranational Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF) has become the first borrower from the region to sell paper linked to Sofr.

A trio of foreign banks tapped an attractive Swiss market this week, finding opportunities to top up their well-advanced funding programmes with a bit of pricing arbitrage.

Light, the fifth largest energy distributor in Brazil, began investor calls on Wednesday ahead of a proposed five year non-call three deal that it will use to redeem its only international bond. The company joins a long line-up of LatAm companies preparing to issue, with the strong pipeline likely to translate into new supply as soon as Thursday.

Bankers working on Brazilian meatpacker JBS’s $1bn sustainability-linked bond on Tuesday said that ESG funds had been responsible for some of the largest orders in the controversial company’s deal, as corporate borrowers in some of the least green sectors join the ESG debt carnival.

Santander Chile sold its first public international bond in over a year on Tuesday, turning to the Swiss franc market and pricing well inside its domestic curve as the local market loses its lustre.

Emerging market fixed income analysts are right to assert that the asset class is well placed to avoid a taper tantrum such as it endured in 2013. That does not mean issuers should not be hurrying up their funding plans.