Switzerland

Intesa Sanpaolo Bank Ireland this week printed a bond with what leads said was the lowest ever yield in Swiss francs from an Italian issuer. Following successful outings earlier this year in euros and yen, Italy’s largest banking group by assets turned to Swiss francs on Tuesday with a Sfr225m ($227.3m) five year senior trade that was also the first from an Italian borrower in the currency this year and the largest since the financial crisis.

Swiss medical firm Lonza has refinanced its term debt and revolving credit facilities, in dollars, euros and Swiss francs.

Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, the Belgian investment company, has launched a €750m bond exchangeable into shares in LafargeHolcim, the Swiss building materials company.

Credit Suisse and SpareBank 1 priced deals in senior format this week, choosing longer maturities to avoid entering negative yield territory. SpareBank 1’s €500m green bond attracted demand of €700m but leads were not able to tighten pricing to the tight end of their price guidance.

A manic Wednesday night of block trades capped off a good week for ECM volume as sellers took advantage of a positive market environment.

Domestic borrowers led Swiss franc issuance this week. On Monday, the multi-line insurance company Baloise Holding (rated A- by Standard & Poor’s) returned to the market for the first time since January, with a three-tranche Sfr425m ($432.7m) trade led by Credit Suisse and UBS. Before this issue, its largest outstanding bond in the Swiss market was its Sfr300m 2.875% 10 year trade maturing in 2020.

Salt, the Swiss telecommunications company controlled by a French billionaire Xavier Niel, is touring Europe this week marketing senior secured notes, as it attempts to refinance a large chunk of its existing debt.

Credit Suisse was marketing a 10 year bullet senior bond on Tuesday, avoiding negative yields by choosing a tenor longer than seven years. At the same time, Sparebank 1 announced it was readying its green debut in senior format.

The summer’s long drought in international issuance in Swiss francs ended with a flourish this week. A cluster of well-received transactions were priced on Tuesday and Wednesday, all of them offering positive yields and warmly welcomed by an investor base increasingly frustrated by a diet of negative-yielding issues in the domestic market.

Yields continued to tumble in the Swiss franc bond market this week with Pfandbriefbank issuing the first 30 year covered bond to be sold with a negative yield, following Münchener Hypothekenbank (MünHyp) striking a new record low for covered bond yields with a nine year trade.

Market participants are confident that FIG issuance will pick up next week but there are concerns around secondary performance. They are likely to pay close attention to how this week’s deals from Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse fare before marketing their own.

Credit Suisse sold a dollar-denominated additional tier one (AT1) bond on Wednesday. Despite hefty demand for the notes, the issuer only revised the pricing by a small margin as market turmoil increased through the day.