RIL achieves lowest coupon on its $750 million bond issue

Reliance Industries (RIL) Friday said it has recently raised $750 million through the first ever single tranche, 30-year deal with lowest coupon ever achieved by an Asian private corporate issuer.

This is the second time in less than two weeks that Reliance Industries has raised funds from the overseas debt market. The raised funds will be for its ongoing capital expenditure.

Market analysts said that raising the $750 million through a 30-year bond is significant, as the company achieved the lowest coupon by an Asian private corporate issuer for a 30-year issuance.

According to the company, the 30-year bond deal makes it the first ever single tranche 30-year deal by a private corporate issuer out of Asia.

The company said the deal has opened the 30-year market for corporate issuances out of Asia in 2015.

With the latest deal RIL continues to be the only company out of India to have issued long-dated 30 year bonds.

"RIL is the only private corporate issuer of 30 years bonds in Asia for over a decade and the money was raised at the lowest ever coupon," V. Srikanth, joint chief financial officer of RIL told IANS.

"This access to very long-term capital is available only to companies who have established a global scale of business, track records and strong investment grade ratings."

Currently, the company is in the midst of its largest ever capex program of over $30 billion across refinery, petrochemicals and the telecom 4G rollout through Reliance Jio.

"The foreign currency financing being tied up is primarily for RIL's expansion projects in the refining and petrochemical businesses," said Srikanth.

"Given that RIL has a natural hedge in terms of its earning streams which are in US Dollars or linked to USD, the focus is on foreign currency financing. In Jio, given that the earnings will be in Rupees, the debt will be pre-dominantly raised in India," he added.

The company said the primary objectives of the financing program was to diversify away from loan markets and increase the average maturity of its debt.

"Post-completion of all draw downs under the financing programme, the average life of the company's debt will double from around 3.75 years to around 7.5 years, in line with global energy players," Srikanth said.

Reliance went in for the second bond issuance on Feb 4 and raised $750 million after a Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML) team advised it to opportunistically capitalize the latent demand from investors for long-dated paper from high quality credits.

On Jan 21, the company successfully raised $1 billion through a 10-year bond issue.