Yoma in Thai bond offering of 2.3b baht

BURMESE conglomerate Yoma Strategic this week announced that it has filed with the the Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand (SEC) to do a bond offering of 2.3 billion baht (S$97.3 million), making it the first Myanmar-focused company to raise bonds in Thailand, or anywhere in the world for the matter.

In a phone interview with The Business Times, chief financial officer JR Ching said that most Burmese companies simply take bank debt. Meanwhile, Thailand has been promoting itself as a hub for investments and capital raising, especially for companies from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. "We wanted to diversify our investor base. We are pretty well-known in the Singapore market, especially on the equity side of things, and we wanted to make sure that we also have this new investor base as we were looking to diversify our sources of funding."

The bond issue thus became a platform for it to market itself more actively to Thai investors, both for debt and equity. "We are talking to a number of real money account and asset managers in Thailand, especially on the fixed income side, and clearly these houses have an equity side as well," Mr Ching said.