Ascendas Pte Ltd bond sale - first SGD deal in 2016

ASCENDAS Pte Ltd is selling a 7-year bond on Monday, the first public Singdollar issue in 2016, offering a safe haven investment amid the turmoil in equity and currency markets.

Orderbooks are in excess of S$300 million and the final price guidance has been lowered to 3.5 per cent, said bondsupermart.com, a fixed income portal.

The size of the issue is S$200 million.

The oversubscription allowed tightening from the initial price guidance of 3.65 per cent - already seen as tight.

The timing of the issue is also apt, given that this is a safe haven bond play, amidst the current stock/currency market volatility, said Terence Lin, iFast's regional research manager in the fixed-income division. bondsupermart.com is part of iFast.

The new bond issue is the first from Ascendas Pte Ltd since Ascendas and Singbridge merged in 2015; the new entity Ascendas-Singbridge is jointly owned by Temasek Holdings (51 per cent) and JTC Corp (49 per cent), while Ascendas is now a member of the new Ascendas-Singbridge entity.

"Given the pedigree of its parentage (ultimately wholly-owned by the Singapore Government), the new Ascendas bonds are expected to be priced at a fairly modest yield; guidance has been set at 3.65 per cent, or a 97 basis points spread against the 7-year swap offer rate of 2.68 per cent," said bondsupermart in a morning note.

DBS Bank, Mizuho Securities, OCBC Bank, United Overseas Bank are joint bookrunners.