Morgan Stanley led a blow-out transaction for the Taiwanese semiconductor company yesterday Tuesday, with books for a $302 million deal closing 15 times oversubscribed in the space of an eight hour marketing period.
The deal marked the first instance of an Asian company selling a convertible into Treasury shares and as such necessitated a number of structural tweaks. The principal one was a shorter-than-expected maturity of 2.25 years, a reflection of the fact that under Taiwanese law companies cannot issue dividends into Treasury shares. UMC, which wanted to dispose of all of its available Treasury shares, normally pays a high stock dividend of about 15%.
The deal was priced with a zero...
