SoftBank Group Corp is readying itself to launch a ton of US dollar bonds. Bloomberg reckons it could amount to as much as $20bn. That’s chunky, even in the hyperscaler era, and will cause a big splash in the high-yield bond market.
The PowerPoint legends who manage the SoftBank Vision Fund already have €8.3bn of euro-denominated bonds and almost ¥6tn ($38.2bn) of yen bonds outstanding. Given Softbank’s junk rating, this makes it the largest single index constituent in the ICE BofA Euro high-yield index. We can’t find an equivalent yen index, but if there was one, SoftBank bonds look to us like they’d populate over four-fifths of it.
But where would SoftBank place in the OG market for junk bonds? To take the top spot in the US high-yield index its total bond outstandings would need to eclipse Charter Communications’ $25.9bn. Alphaville’s Bloomberg terminal informs us that SoftBank has already issued $12.6bn of US dollar bonds, so maybe SoftBank can now grab the top spot in the US index too?