Incumbent telco and satellite operator Korea Telecom Corp is out with a dollar-denominated five-year senior unsecured bond offering.
The size of the offering is understood to be around US$350m, higher than the initially planned US$300m, with Citigroup,…
Incumbent telco and satellite operator Korea Telecom Corp is out with a dollar-denominated five-year senior unsecured bond offering.
The size of the offering is understood to be around US$350m, higher than the initially planned US$300m, with Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan joint bookrunners on the transaction.
The company was not available for comment before the press deadline but according to reports, the bond priced at 99.892 to yield 3.899% with a spread of 310bp over Treasuries. Investor demand for the debt was high, with the order book allegedly around US$4.7bn, over 13 times oversubscribed.
Proceeds from the offering will predominantly be used to repay existing debt maturing in the first half of 2012, in particular the W100bn (US$88m) worth of unsecured 4.37% 3-year notes that KT Corp issued in May 2009.
Before this dollar bond offering, KT Corp’s most recent issue dates back to early 2010, when it raised W600bn (US$527m) in a triple-tranche domestic note offering. The company had planned to launch a Swiss-franc denominated offering in November 2011 but the transaction never took place.
Despite having sold a number of its spacecraft, including Koreasat-3 in May 2010, to satellite operator Asia Broadcast Satellite, KT Corp remains active in the industry.
It still owns Koreasat-5 and Koreasat-6, and in July last year signed a multi-million dollar transponder lease agreement with ABS for ABS-2 satellite, which is scheduled to be operational by Q1 2013.
The company also leases capacity from Intelsat and AsiaSat as well as offering a number of Inmarsat services including BGAN and its Global Satellite Phone Service (GSPS).
