PDVSA Said to Plan $3 Billion 20-Year Bond Sale This Month
May 4 (Bloomberg) -- Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the state- owned oil company, will sell $3 billion of 20-year bonds this month, according to a government official who is involved in the operation.
The Venezuelan central bank and other financial institutions are interested in buying the bonds, which will carry an interest rate of 9 percent and be sold before May 14, said the official, who asked not to be identified because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
PDVSA, as the Caracas-based company is known, hasn’t sold dollar bonds since November when it issued $2.4 billion of securities in a private placement with the central bank. The Venezuelan government and PDVSA sell dollar-denominated bonds locally in bolivars at the official exchange rate, which allows companies and individuals to obtain foreign currency by selling the notes abroad to investors.
“Supply is long overdue,” Siobhan Morden, the head of Latin America strategy at Jefferies Group Inc. in New York, said in an e-mail.
This is the best moment for PDVSA to borrow in dollars in the past 18 months, the government official said.
An official at PDVSA declined to comment on any sale.
PDVSA bonds have rallied this year on speculation that President Hugo Chavez, who depends on the oil company to finance his government, may not be fit to stand for re-election and that a new administration may reverse policies that have caused a stagnation in oil production.
Chavez in Cuba
Chavez, 57, has spent more time in Cuba receiving treatment for an undisclosed cancer than in Venezuela since February, while saying that he’ll be the candidate in October elections. The self-declared socialist revolutionary has led Venezuela since 1999.
Bonds issued by PDVSA were the second-most actively traded dollar-denominated corporate securities by dealers in the past week, with 846 trades of $1 million or more, according to Trace, the bond-price reporting system of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Notes from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. were the most active.
The yield on PDVSA’s benchmark 8.5 percent bonds due in 2017 rose 45 basis points, or 0.45 percentage point, to 11.19 percent at 4:51 p.m. in Caracas, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The bond’s price fell 1.71 cents to 89.20 cents on the dollar.
Most of the bonds will probably be sold gradually through the central bank’s currency market, avoiding a glut, Victor Sierra, a managing director at Torino Capital LLC in New York, said in an e-mail.
Market Effect
“The net effect on the market should be fairly neutral in the short end,” Sierra said. “I expect a rebound in the coming days as Chavez health issues continue.”
Net income surged 42 percent in 2011 to $4.5 billion on $124 billion of revenue, the oil company said April 17. Total debt rose 40 percent last year to $34.9 billion after the company sold $10.3 billion of dollar-denominated bonds to finance the development of new oil projects and government social programs.
PDVSA President Rafael Ramirez said last month that the company’s debt levels are “comfortable” and that there’s room to borrow more in coming years amid efforts to tap heavy crude reserves in the Orinoco belt with private partners including Chevron Corp. (CVX), Eni SpA (ENI) and Repsol YPF SA.
Of the $3 billion from the new bond sale, $1 billion will probably be allocated to the central bank and the rest to companies in “strategic sectors” for imports of food, medicine and machinery, Asdrubal Oliveros, director of Caracas-based economic consulting and research firm Ecoanalitica, said in a phone interview.
“Most of the new supply should come in a relatively smooth way, with daily sales through Sitme instead of a sudden flow, helping contain volatility,” Barclays Capital analysts Alejandro Arreaza and Alejandro Grisanti wrote today in a note to clients.
To contact the reporters on this story: Corina Pons in Caracas at
[email protected]; Daniel Cancel in Caracas at
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To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Papadopoulos at
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