GlobalCapital: How has Covid-19 changed your approach to ESG?
Kazuyuki Aihara, Nomura: Covid-19 had a major impact on the bond market. Covid-19 response bonds were issued in large numbers and, as a result of that, the social bond market got bigger. That is one major impact of the pandemic on the sustainable financing market. The pandemic also changed how issuers view the markets, particularly by encouraging them to consider shorter-term funding.
The major impact we have seen, however, is that the vulnerability of the world became clear and that threw questions of sustainability into sharp relief. That was not necessarily reflected in rising issuance. Of course, we saw some Covid-19 bonds but green bond issuance did not really increase. Still, the market started to pay more attention to sustainability and what it means in practice. That is going to help this market grow in the long term.
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
By Morgan Davis
04.15 PM
The Japanese bond market had a blow-out year in 2020, despite the ongoing pandemic and related volatility. With 2021 already characterised by eager borrowers and large acquisition financing activity, DCM bankers are preparing for another record setting year. Morgan Davis reports.
The past year has been a volatile one for capital markets around the world. Businesses in Japan were battered and many permanently closed. The country was forced to postpone its 2020 Olympics, and uncertainty remains around how safe it is for the event to be held this summer, as planned. Since the start of 2020, Japan has reported more than 500,000 cases of Covid-19, resulting in around 9,400 deaths.