UniCredit

With Europe’s high yield market all but becalmed after the quietest November for new issuance for five years, market participants are trying to work out how serious the market’s plight is.

Onex, the Canadian private equity firm, has acquired SIG Combibloc, the Swiss drinks carton maker, for €3.75bn and confirmed 10 banks that will arrange the leveraged buyout.

Italian gas distributor 2i Rete Gas issued a €540m long five year bond on Friday, to rebalance the proportion of bank loans and capital markets instruments in its debt profile.

Siemens Audiology Solutions, the hearing aid maker, has launched the €1.06bn bond and cov-lite loan package that will back its buyout by EQT.

Wienerberger, the world’s largest brick maker, has replaced two lines of credit with a €400m five year revolver.

Three issuers from France, Belgium and Germany raised €2.5bn in the covered bond market this week, and another €1bn transaction was expected from a Finnish issuer on Friday. The deals were all remarkable for the fact that the funding levels set new records for all issuers as the ECB’s allocation continued to grow, squeezing out other investors.

UniCredit Italy has revitalised hopes for the conditional pass through (CPT) covered bond structure which was pioneered by NIBC over a year ago and was at risk of being ignored by everyone else. The Italian national champion has restructured one of its covered bond programmes from a soft bullet maturity and intends to sell bonds from it next year.

Hapag-Lloyd, the German container shipping company, jumped into the high yield bond market on Thursday for a drive-by sale of a €250m bond, to refinance a deal maturing next year.

A flood of financial institution bond issuance this week concluded on Friday with a brace of tier two deals, from Standard Chartered and Italy’s Generali.

Investment banking profits look poor at the two big Italian banks, UniCredit and Intesa’s investment bank Banca IMI.

The European Financial Stability Facility was able to price its tightest ever 10 year benchmark this week, while sovereign, supranational and agency officials cast doubt on whether European Central Bank covered bond buying would have much knock-on effect on SSA bond spreads when supply surges in January.

Pirelli, the Italian tyre producer, launched its first bond for two years on Thursday, and its first in euros since February 2011, and achieved a tremendous blowout, with a book of well over €5bn before reconciliation.