South Korea

In this round-up, Chinese premier Li Keqiang said RMB internationalisation to continue, South Korea's RMB deposits halving in a few months, HKMA revamps its RMB liquidity facility, Singapore Exchange and Moscow Exchange see surging RMB trade volumes, Shanghai Gold Exchange expands its list of assets that can be used as collateral for trading to A-shares and foreign currencies, and Deutsche Bank joins OTC Clear as a clearing member.

Asia’s dollar bond market finally sprang to life this week with a trio of investment grade names successfully pricing deals. Participants are now hoping that the market is open for business, but lingering volatility means trades will come with a bigger price tag, write Narae Kim and Rashmi Kumar.

Korea Development Bank (KDB) staged a successful return to the international debt market on September 9, selling an SEC registered 10 year trade. The policy bank’s success is expected to encourage more Korean names to follow suit, but bankers are not necessarily expecting a rush of issuance.

Citi has appointed David Ratliff to the newly created position of head of public sector banking for Asia Pacific. The move is part of the bank’s strategy to combine corporate and investment banking alongside markets and securities services coverage of public sector clients in the region.

Summarecon Investment Property (SIP), a unit of Indonesian property giant Summarecon Agung, is looking to raise $200m-$250m in an IPO, with banks on the trade expecting to open books in October or November.

Asian bond issuers have finally decided to venture back into the market with a trio of investment grade names opening books to dollar deals. Export-Import Bank of China (Chexim), Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and Korea Development Bank are vying for attention in the first test of investor demand in three weeks.

Lotte Group has shortlisted seven candidates for the proposed listing of its hotel chain business, having sent out a request for proposals last month.

The Export-Import Bank of Korea (Kexim) has returned to the Thai baht bond market after a gap of two years, with the hiatus helping it find strong pent-up demand. The issuer printed the largest single tranche trade from a foreign issuer in the currency, while also pricing tighter than its existing bonds.

Korea Gas Corp (KoGas) is gearing up to raise as much as $1.7bn in offshore bonds next year, as part of plans to refinance existing debt and fund overseas projects.

The hotly anticipated IPO of South Korean weapons manufacturer LIG Nex1 has been pushed back for two weeks due to a government investigation into an anti-tank missile it had developed.

The vast majority of payments from South Korea to China and Hong Kong are now processed in RMB, Swift said in its latest RMB Tracker report issued on September 1. A day earlier, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (Safe) said it had added three new Seoul-based institutional investors to the RMB qualified foreign institutional investor (RQFII) programme in August, with 60% of the Rmb80bn ($12.4bn) country quota now distributed.

A large financing for the acquisition of Tesco’s South Korean asset, Homeplus, has created a stir in the market, coming amid a dearth of private equity-backed leveraged deals in Asia. But the role of foreign banks may be limited by abundant onshore liquidity and the presence of domestic funds, which are keen to take on junior debt, writes Shruti Chaturvedi.