Petrobras Record Bond Sale in Shadow of Apple’s Record Capital Raise

The use of funds for Petrobras is very different versus the consumer electronics giant’s record sale. Apple’s $100+ billion in cash is largely housed overseas where so much of its sales have taken place and it would face serious tax consequences for repatriating that capital. Apple’s $17 billion bond sale was to finance dividends and buybacks. Petrobras is borrowing this money to finance or pay for the development of its vast offshore oil fields. Apple’s capital return plan is $50 billion for the coming years, but Petrobras has an ambitious capital spending plan that could get to be more than $200 billion in the coming years.

One commonality between the Petrobras offering and the Apple offering is that there are multiple tranches in the offering. Petrobras has two floating rate tranches, with 2016 and 2019 maturities. Its fixed-rate tranches have maturities in three years in 2016, six years in 2019, ten years in 2023, and one out thirty years due all the way out in 2043.

Another commonality is solid investor demand. Corporate bond buyers have been clamoring to either find yield or to put large amounts of capital to work. Apple met strong demand and the Petrobras offering has had bids that are supposedly over 200% oversubscribed.

Is history a guide here? Petrobras is the third largest energy company in the world and has a daily output of 2.6 million barrels of oil equivalent. With a record corporate bond sale from an emerging market player, we have to wonder if the record stock sale that was also from Petrobras brings any lessons. This bond offering is also not that long after multi-billion corporate bond offerings in the U.S. from Sinopec in China and Lukoil in Russia.

To keep things even more on edge, this emerging market record bond size from Petrobras could be upsized as well because there is a possibility that foreign firms will be sold more bonds Monday night or Tuesday morning. We will update this for Tuesday as the formal pricing should be confirmed within the next couple of hours on Monday.