In a quiet week for ECM bankers just 15 offerings were completed for less than $900m. Merrill Lynch continues to heads the Asia ex Japan ECM table after it acted as a joint bookrunner on the $328 million equivalent follow on for Thai Airways International. This pushed its total for the year up over the $3.8 billion mark from 16 transactions.
Citigroup was absent from the market this week so this extended Merrill's lead to some $387 million. The Thai Airways offering also helped JP Morgan to leapfrog above UBS into fourth spot with $2.9 billion from 17 deals. Aside from this there was no other movement in the top ten as the second largest deal - a $250 million exchangeable for Kepco - was run by ING which sits well down the field.
Pre-marketing has started on the $2.8 billion IPO for China Life with Citigroup, CSFB, CICC and Deutsche appointed as bookrunners. This deal is set to price sometime in December and will have a massive influence on the final league table rankings for 2003.
Debt Capital Markets
Hutchison has dominated this year in Asia, and it continued this trend with a $5 billion issue earlier this week. Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and HSBC have gained large league table credit off the Hong Kong based conglomerate this year and were joined by Citigroup for this bumper trade.
HSBC's lead at the top of the table is now unassailable with just six weeks left until the end of the year, recording $10.2 billion. This is almost $5 billion more than nearest rival Deutsche Bank which has $5.4 billion.
In the battle for third place, Citigroup made massive strides on KDB - closing the gap from $1.1 billion to just $30 million. Merrill rose in the table to fifth from seventh while Goldman shot into the seventh spot after languishing outside the top ten last week.
Despite being left out of the Hutch issue, Deutsche Bank ran a $250 million offering for Korea Gas Corp along with CSFB that priced late on Thursday. The pipeline for next week is thin, but Hyundai Motor is expected to come to the market for a $400 million seven year issue through Citigroup and UBS.
