Mumbai: Bharti Airtel today mopped up euro 50 million from an international bond sale as it readies for he spectrum auction next month, merchant bankers said. The country's largest telecom firm raised the money at a coupon of 4.05 per cent for the five-year paper, they said.
“The euro market provides an efficient and consistent source of liquidity. The market has significant depth and comparable in size to the USD market,” Deutsche Bank's head of financing in India, Randhir Singh, said, confirming the deal. This is the third bond issue by the private telecom operator this calendar year.
The latest money has been raised through the company's wholly-owned subsidiary Bharti Airtel International (Netherlands) BV. Roadshows for the issue were held in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt last week.
“The euro market offers significant tenor flexibility, with the market being extremely liquid out to 10-years and flexibility to issue in odd maturities,” he said.
The final pricing got tightened by 0.05 per cent from the guidance of 4.10 per cent, merchant banking sources said.
Bharti could not be reached immediately for comments. This is the third major bond sale by an India firm after the May 24 tapering talk by the US Fed, which spiked interest rates in western markets. The other two have been HDFC Bank's USD 500 million in October and ICICI Bank's USD 750 million last month.
The money raised by Bharti will be fully guaranteed by the parent company, according to earlier reports.
Apart from Deutsche Bank, StanChart, Barclays, JP Morgan, UBS and BNP Paribas acted as the joint book-runners and lead managers to the issue.
In March this year, the company had raised USD 1.5 billion in overseas debt in two tranches in March. Fitch Ratings had assigned BBB- ratings to the senior unsecured euro notes.
This takes the overall mop up by Indian companies during the year to USD 15 billion in overseas debt against the USD 10 billion in 2012.
