REFILE - Singapore Bond House: United Overseas Bank
All-round star
United Overseas Bank’s long-term work to develop its debt capital markets capabilities paid off, as its deal volume and breadth made it the top Singapore bond house of 2024.
The bank ranked in second place in the Singapore dollar bond league table having helped raise S$5.57bn (US$4.1bn), just a whisker short of top spot and with a 20.6% market share.
UOB’s years of work and relationship building translated into a number of lead roles on noteworthy deals, for example on Daewoo Engineering & Construction’s debut S$150m five-year bond priced at par to yield 3.88% and backed by the Credit Guarantee and Investment Facility.
The South Korean issuer saw strong demand of over three times the issue size, even though it was a relatively unfamiliar name to investors in Singapore.
UOB was a key supporter of other international borrowers coming to the Singaporean market as well. It helped BNP Paribas visit three times to raise a total of S$1.2bn.
The bank worked on major deals throughout the year, including the Singaporean government’s S$2.5bn green infrastructure bonds – the second-largest syndicated bond transaction in the Singapore dollar market to date – and HSBC’s S$1.5bn 5.25% perpetual non-call 5.5-year Additional Tier 1 bond.
Its ESG skills were on show as it led Asia’s first subordinated sustainability-linked perpetual bond, issued by Singapore data centre STT GDC. The company sold the boundary-pushing S$450m 5.7% perp non-call six-year with a coupon tied to a target of raising the percentage of renewable energy in its total electricity consumption to 60% by 2026. Discussion on the deal, the world’s first perpetual bond from a data centre operator, started as early as 2019. Despite the complicated nature of the deal, the bank managed to help bring in an order book of S$1bn from 70 accounts at reoffer, including S$15m from the leads. The deal was also the first Singapore dollar deal to be priced that year.
UOB bagged a number of sole mandates as well, the three largest of which were HDB’s S$700m seven-year 3.151% bond, CLI Treasury’s S$350m 10.5-year 3.58% notes, and Public Utilities Board’s S$325m seven-year 2.502% offering. Others included National University of Singapore’s S$200m 3.255% five-year issue and CapitaLand Ascott REIT’s S$120m 3.69% five-year note.
The bank barely figured in the Singapore dollar bond market in 2017, when it ranked fifth in the league table. That year, it appointed Edmund Leong as its head of group investment banking and Carolyn Tan to lead the DCM team, beginning the transformation that would turn it into Singapore’s top bond house.
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