Loans and High Yield

US private placement agents have struggled to attract their typical stable of well rated corporates to their market this year. Public bond markets have proven too cheap for PP funding to compete and the European wing of the market has suffered as a consequence. But instead of waiting for the scales to tip back, agents should find new European borrowers from the financial institutions sector.

Dollar bonds from high yield Chinese real estate companies tightened in the secondary market on Tuesday, after plummeting in the run up to the Lunar New Year break amid news from firms under liquidity pressure.

Thai Union Group, a seafood producer, has raised its first sustainability-linked loan of Bt12bn ($401m)-equivalent from the Thai and Japanese markets.

Trafigura, one of the world’s largest commodity traders, has closed a Schuldschein issue in a debut that surprised many in the market. The deal shows there is an appetite for unusual credits among some of the market’s investors. Trafigura’s group treasurer told GlobalCapital that this SSD is only the first from his company.

One of Europe’s largest self-storage companies Shurgard has priced a new €300m US private placement, according to market sources.

Schuldschein investors have told GlobalCapital that dwindling deal flow has meant they have to look elsewhere for assets. Some have turned to the secondary markets and others to bilateral deals.

The date that the UK regulator has set to stop new Libor lending is just over six weeks away but market participants once again sounded the warning bells this week over the readiness of lenders to leave the old benchmark behind.

Kirshlen Moodley, formerly a member of JP Morgan's UK M&A team, has joined BNP Paribas.

Stark Group’s strong performance amid the pandemic is a crucial selling point for investors looking at buying the €1.35bn loan to fund its purchase by CVC, which agreed to buy the firm from Lone Star in January. The group has added an ESG ratchet to the facility, an increasingly common structure this year, with a margin stepdown if it cuts greenhouse gas emissions.

The financing for the Issa brothers and TDR Capital’s buyout of Asda was priced on Wednesday, breaking multiple records in the process and showing that, for the right issuer in the right conditions, the sterling market can shoulder the bulk of a multi-billion LBO package. Owen Sanderson reports.

India’s well-established renewable energy companies have long been known for selling green bonds, but this week showed that new issuers are ready to join the fray — not just with green deals, but also with sustainability-linked transactions. Morgan Davis reports.

Asda has definitively demonstrated the sterling high yield market’s capacity to do size, garnering more than £8bn of orders across the two tranches of its buy-out financing. Investors bemoaning their likely miserable allocations, however, may find some cold comfort in a refi issue from fellow UK supermarket Iceland, announced on Wednesday.