Middle East Bond House: HSBC
Blooming in the desert
In a year in which Saudi Arabia became the most important jurisdiction for international bond issuance in global emerging markets, no other bank can match HSBC’s leadership in the kingdom. And beyond Saudi Arabia it has worked on some of the region’s biggest and most important deals. HSBC is IFR’s Middle East Bond House of the Year.
A big shift took place in the global EM primary bond markets in 2025: Saudi Arabia became the most prolific jurisdiction for issuance across G3 currencies. And no bank did more to lead that charge than HSBC.
Forget the league table – it’s more the bank’s role on the key transactions that stood out.
It missed out as a global coordinator on the sovereign’s US$12bn transaction at the start of the year, with only a passive bookrunner role, but there were few deals that followed on which it was neither a global coordinator nor an active bookrunner.
Saudi Arabia did two more trades, with HSBC taking senior roles on both – a €2.25bn dual-tranche deal, with the €1.5bn seven-year tranche as its first green bond, and US$5.5bn dual-tranche sukuk, its first AAOIFI-compliant issue.
For the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund, HSBC was a global coordinator or active bookrunner on all four of its deals in 2025 across conventional US dollars, sukuk and euros.
In the corporate market, the bank had senior roles for a debut deal by Saudi Arabian Mining Company, Maaden, debut and follow-up transactions by Saudi Real Estate Refinance Company, as global coordinator on both, and conventional and sukuk issues by oil giant Saudi Aramco.
The FIG sector was also more active in 2025. Among other things, HSBC led Additional Tier1, Tier 2 and senior transactions by Banque Saudi Fransi, was a global coordinator on a debut AT1 from Bank Albilad and took Saudi National Bank to the Formosa market.
“If there’s a bank to call in Saudi Arabia, it’s HSBC,” said Khaled Darwish, HSBC's head of CEEMEA debt capital markets.
The bank’s platforms for Asia and the Middle East proved powerful distribution networks. Both the Saudi Arabia and PIF sukuk transactions were notable for the significant allocation to Asian investors, at just less than a third.
Outside Saudi Arabia, HSBC was a global coordinator on Kuwait’s US$11.25bn triple-tranche deal, the sovereign’s first international transaction since 2017.
While there was pent-up demand, the deal was not without its complexities, with Kuwait no longer a member of JP Morgan’s Emerging Markets Bond Index having been reclassified as a developed market along with Qatar.
Yet final combined order books were US$22.8bn with the average allocation of the three tranches evenly spread across MENA at 33%, the UK and Europe at 30% and Americas at 26%, as well as a 10% allocation to Asia.
Pricing was relatively tight, with the spread between the three and five-year tranches flat and just 10bp for the curve extension to 10 years.
Kuwait's comeback trade, Saudi Arabia’s euro print and its AAOIFI-compliant sukuk offering are what Adam Bothamley, global head of debt capital markets, describes as “quintessential HSBC deals”.
HSBC’s Middle East business was spread across almost the entire region and not just in the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council – Jordan, for example, was one of the sovereigns the bank helped access the primary market in 2025.
But it is, of course, the GCC that dominates the region’s flow. And even in jurisdictions in which the bank missed out on the sovereign’s deals in 2025 – Qatar, for example – it still supported other issuers.
HSBC was a global coordinator and sole structurer on Qatar Insurance Company’s US$500m perpetual non-call six Tier 2 bond in its first deal since 2022. The notes include mandatory deferral upon breach of minimum capital requirements and optional deferral at the issuer’s discretion, but there are no principal loss-absorption features or step-up.
It was also a bookrunner and sole green structuring agent for Qatar National Bank’s €750m five-year green bond, its debut deal in the single currency. Investors with an ESG capacity made up about 56% of allocations while 44% went to European accounts, fulfilling the objective of diversifying QNB’s buyer base.
In the UAE, where it missed out on Adnoc Murban’s debut sukuk, it still had an impressive roster of transactions that included DP World’s US$1.5bn 10-year sukuk, which uses a manafae structure in which an SPV sells the ports’ capacity rights to investors; First Abu Dhabi Bank’s US$100m three-year digitally native bond, the first blockchain-based bond issuance from the MENA region; and Abu Dhabi’s US$3bn dual-tranche deal, which included a record tight spread for a US dollar 10-year bond for an EM issuer.