GlobalCapital
GlobalCapital: How did you adjust your funding plans — and your business strategy — in response to the pandemic?
Yoshitaka Hidaka, JBIC: Needless to say, the pandemic affected JBIC’s funding strategy as well as our business strategy in a significant way. Let me go back to our funding plan in February 2020. At that time, which was around when Covid began to spread, we were planning a bond issue. Because of the increase in market volatility, we decided not to go ahead and instead to wait for calmness to be restored to the market.
How did we fund ourselves in the meantime? We just tried to tide ourselves over by using short-term bond issues. We used the dollar-yen swap to fund ourselves with short-dated dollars. That was a reasonable solution for the short term, but since our assets are long term we wanted to issue a long-term bond. Our plan for the February issuance was a 10 year bond but we changed that to three to five year maturities because of the sharp rise in market volatility. That is one example of how we changed our funding strategy.