Philippine Dealing & Exchange Corp., the operator of the country’s fixed income market, sees bond listings this year to hit a record P300 billion.
PDEx president Antonio Nakpil said in a recent interview bond listings in the first nine months of the year reached P260 billion, up 109 percent year-on-year.
The nine-month bond listing figure already exceeded the P256.4-billion amount recorded in the whole of 2018.
Nakpil said at least six to eight more companies were expected to conduct bond listings during the last quarter of the year and push the total to P300 billion.
“We have chance to probably reach around P300 billion because right now we are at P260 billion. This is not totally unexpected because we have expected banks to come in with their bank bond issuance program,” Nakpil said.
He said the upcoming bond listings were mostly in the banking sector.
“The bank bond issuance program has been the main driven for bond listing after regulators eased the rules. Banks were given lot of incentives given by regulations for them to shift their deposits to long term funding via bonds. The deregulation they released were very ‘incentivising’ for the banks,” Nakpil said.
Among the banks that issued bonds this year were BDO Unibank Inc., Metropolitan Bank & Trust Co., Philippine National Bank, Robinsons Bank, Philippine Savings Bank and Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.
Ayala Land Inc. and San Miguel Corp. also listed their respective bond offerings last week.
ALI raised P3 billion from five-year bonds while San Miguel generated P10 billion. The two latest bond listings lifted the total outstanding amount of listed corporate securities to P1.32 trillion.
“These are positive strides for the depth of the bond market and a good foundation for the next challenge, to spread the breadth to more include issuers and widen the variety of instruments,” Nakpil said.
“And as we move to invite more corporations to become issuers/listers, we will look to our pioneer issuer as a leading example of how firms build relationships with their investors and are able to effectively utilize the capital market within their strategic plans,” he added.