South Africa’s MTN taps bond market for $145 mln

South Africa’s MTN has raised 2.5 billion rand ($145 million) in three bonds as a way of lengthening its debt maturity profile, the mobile operator said on Friday.

In an auction held on Tuesday, MTN issued 540 million rand, 1.04 billion rand and 984 million rand respectively in three, five and seven-year notes.

“The auction has allowed MTN to meaningfully improve our pricing across the curve, lengthen our debt maturity profile and advanced our strategic activities of improving our ratio of non-rand to rand-denominated debt while at the same time increasing our usage of the local debt capital markets,” it said.

MTN added that the ratio of non-rand to rand-denominated debt would improve further to 33:67 after this issuance, compared with the 42:58 ratio reported in MTN’s 2022 interim results. Nasdaq