Mexico may sell more bonds in the international markets for liability management after front-loading most of its external financing needs with two large deals earlier this month, a senior debt official told LatinFinance on Thursday.
“We could do something more in yen,” María del Carmen Bonilla, head of public credit and international affairs at the Mexican Ministry of Finance, said on the sidelines of LatinFinance’s Latin America Capital Markets Summit in New York. “But we have already covered almost 70% of our external financing needs for this year.”
The sovereign has tapped the international markets twice so far this year with large and vastly oversubscribed deals. At the start of the year, it raised $7.5 billion in its biggest-ever cross-border deal, printing $1 billion in five-year bonds, $4 billion in 12-year bonds and $2.5 billion in 30-year notes. Mexico followed that up some two weeks later with the sale of €2 billion ($2.17 billion at the time) worth of eight-year sustainable development goal bonds in the European market.
Looking forward, Bonilla said that as the government wants to sustain its current share of international bonds in its financing mix for this year, this means it could do smaller deals in those markets or look at other opportunities.
“We could explore the multilaterals or other options, and not necessarily go to the markets,” Bonilla said. “An opportunity could come up with liability management” for selling international bonds, “but we have done a lot of our work already.”