Poland Selling First Swiss Debt in Two Years as Yields Near Lows
Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) — Poland is selling 500 million Swiss francs ($536 million) of notes today in its first issue in the currency for two years as yields hover near all-time lows.
The country is offering senior unsecured debt due September 2021 at a spread of 50 basis points above Swiss midswaps, according to a person with knowledge of the offering who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The yield on Swiss government bonds due April 2021 was 26 basis points at 11:48 a.m. in Zurich, six basis points above last month’s record low.
The sale will partly help roll over 750 million francs of bonds maturing Sept. 23 and pre-finance Poland’s 2015 borrowing needs, at the same time it’s helping the country “keep a presence” on the Swiss market, Deputy Finance Minister Dorota Podedworna-Tarnowska said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
“It makes sense for them to show up from time to time and commit a little bit to the Swiss market,” Benno Weber, the Zurich-based head of fixed income at Swisscanto Asset Management AG, said by phone today. He said the bond’s pricing “starts to look OK” above 50 basis points over midswaps.
The yield on Poland’s franc bond due May 2019 fell one basis point to 0.71 percent today after climbing nine basis points from a record low yesterday as Poland said it could sell a “small” amount of Swiss notes this week.
Poland had 16 billion zloty ($4.93 billion) of debt denominated in francs at the end of June, or 2.2 percent of its total debt, according to Finance Ministry data. Swiss investors held 1.5 billion zloty of Poland’s local-currency notes.
The sovereign, rated A- by Standard & Poor’s, has 1.5 billion francs in notes maturing in May 2015. The country sold 450 million francs in fixed-rate notes and 375 million francs in floating-rate bonds in April 2012.
–With assistance from Levent Kucukreisoglu in London.
To contact the reporters on this story: Maciej Onoszko in Warsaw at monoszko@bloomberg.net; Roxana Zega in Zurich at rzega@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Wojciech Moskwa at wmoskwa@bloomberg.net Stephen Kirkland
