Loans and High Yield

Europe’s corporate bond investors are starting to make bets that industries battered by the coronavirus pandemic and crossover-rated names are going to be the performers of 2021, even though speculative grade defaults reached a post-global financial crisis high in November.

House of HR is marketing a subordinated bond to pay for recent acquisitions and to give the Naxicap portfolio company a war chest to fund campaigns to win other bid targets. High unemployment across the human resources consultancy’s major markets has hurt it, but it claims to be in a good position for a recovery.

Credit Suisse's investment bank is well placed for where the market is heading after the coronavirus pandemic, it said on Tuesday at an investor day. Its new global trading solutions (GTS) business unit may be key to future revenue streams.

Adani International Container Terminal Private (AICTPL), part of India's Adani Group, sold its inaugural dollar bond on Monday. It raised $300m after receiving orders worth $2.85bn.

Engineering equipment group Dürr has raised its third ESG-linked Schuldschein, raising €200m towards the redemption of its €300m 2.875% April 2021 bond. The company opted for the private market alternative, after pulling a contemplated €250m bond issue in early October.

Britishvolt, a start-up UK battery technology company, is looking at a range of funding options for a £2.6bn battery gigaplant site in the UK. A company spokesperson said that bank lending would make up just part of the financing.

Debt collector Lowell said on Friday that it had issued a private placement of high yield bonds to raise £117.5m-equivalent, taking advantage of strong market conditions to further shore up liquidity following its October refi.

Fugro, the Dutch geo-data specialist, has completed its €197m rights issue, a key proponent in a large refinancing package that resolves longstanding issues around debt maturity.

Embattled Chinese borrower Tsinghua Unigroup Co missed payment on a $450m bond that was due on Thursday, with the non-payment expected to trigger cross-defaults on a number of its other dollar notes.

GlobalCapital and Standard Chartered hosted a combination of virtual and in-person roundtable on the China high yield debt market at the end of November. The third part of a 2020 series followed the first roundtable in April and the second in July. This time around, leading experts came together to discuss the opportunities and outlook for the Mainland’s high yield bond market.

The launch this week of the Climate Transition Finance Handbook has propelled the sustainable debt market towards a new era, in which the emphasis moves from a labelled security to the issuer itself, writes Jon Hay.

Green bonds awakened the debt capital markets from their long, slumbrous ignorance of environmental peril.