India’s Bharti Airtel has priced US$1bn of 4.375% senior notes due 2025.
Denominated in US dollars, the notes priced at 210 basis points over the 10-year US dollar Treasury to yield 4.462%, the country’s largest mobile operator said, adding that…
India’s Bharti Airtel has priced US$1bn of 4.375% senior notes due 2025.
Denominated in US dollars, the notes priced at 210 basis points over the 10-year US dollar Treasury to yield 4.462%, the country’s largest mobile operator said, adding that this represents the tightest spread attained by any Indian private sector corporate issuer in the past five years.
The order book was two times oversubscribed, attracting orders of US$2bn from 160 accounts, the telco said.
Sixty-six percent of the notes were allocated to US investors, while 18% went to Europeans and 16% to Asian buyers.
This marks the highest allocation ever to US investors in any Indian deal, according to the company. Eighty-percent of the notes were allocated to mutual funds and insurance companies, while the remainder went to banks.
The joint lead managers for the issue were BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Standard Chartered. DBS Bank was the co-manager.
Airtel group treasurer Harjeet Kohli said the company was extremely pleased with the strong appetite from high-quality investors for the offering, which will help it to further reduce its credit spread.
“With bond issuances of US$6bn outstanding post this issue, Bharti now has a well-established credit curve across tenure buckets and currencies,” he said.
“These, along with the availability under our long-dated ECB terms signed recently with Chinese banks [China Development Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China] significantly elongate the tenure of our financing and also helps larger cash flows at hand.”
Airtel secured financing commitments of up to US$2.5bn from the two Chinese banks last month.
The telco agreed to pay Rs293.1bn (US$4.6bn) for spectrum in the country’s latest spectrum auction, and is currently rolling out 4G services in major cities. It claimed to have more than 324 million customers across its operations in 20 countries at the end of March 2015.
