이 기사는 2019년 11월 07일 08시00분 thebell에 표출된 기사입니다

South Korea's steelmaker POSCO has successfully issued a $500 million global bond this week, raising an aggregate sum of one billion dollars in overseas debt markets this year.

The steel giant announced and started marketing its global bond issue on Monday. The issuance consisted of three-year fixed rate notes (FXD), with initial price guidance (IPG) at 125 basis points over three-year U.S. Treasury yield.

POSCO met a strong demand, receiving nearly 2.8 billion dollars in orders from 145 international institutional investors. This helped the steelmaker to issue the bond with a yield of 2.565 percent, 27.5 basis points lower than IPG.

The final amount was determined to be 500 million dollars, with the coupon rate set at 2.375 percent. 72 percent and 23 percent of the bond were allocated to Asian and the U.S. investors, respectively, and the remaining five percent went to European and the Middle East investors.

This is POSCO's second global bond issue this year since July, when the company raised 500 million dollars through its inaugural sustainability bond sale amid increasing popularity of ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) bonds globally.

POSCO has been accelerating bond sales, both at home and abroad, since it returned to the domestic corporate bond market last July for the first time in two years. The steelmaker also issued dollar-denominated bonds in the overseas market last summer, its first foreign-currency bond issuance since 2013 when the company raised 50 billion yen through Samurai bond sale.

POSCO has a rating of Baa1 by credit ratings agency Moody's and BBB+ by Standard and Poor's (S&P). BNP Paribas, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup Global Markets Securities, HSBC and Standard Chartered acted as joint bookrunners.

(By reporter Pi Hye-rim)