Votorantim Participações is one of the largest Brazilian companies and a world leader in Cement, Steel and other metals among other industries. The company has a very strong presence in Brazil with circa 60% of its income from this country. Votorantim has been actively present in the capital markets in USD and BRL and has now opted to tap the Euro bond market in order to
further diversify its funding sources and extend the maturity profile.
This transaction is only the second Euro denominated bond ever issued by a Brazilian company.
As part of the exercise the company intended to conduct a roadshow across Europe but the volcanic ash cloud made physical meetings impossible. Votorantim then decided to update investors via a series of one-on-one conference calls plus a general investor call.
Given the exceptional circumstances due to the Icelandic volcano inconvenients, investors were very receptive to the company conducting the marketing exercise via telephone and the trade was not impacted by the absence of a physical roadshow
This was very well received by investors and the majority of 1-1 meetings were retained. Both the CEO and CFO of Votorantim performed very strongly throughout the marketing phase and this coupled with the positive marketing tone enabled us to go out with a price whisper of MS +262.5/250bps. The book continued to gain momentum, allowing us to price at the tight end of guidance and to print the maximum deal size set by Votorantim at EUR 750m.
The deal was more the 5x oversubscribed. The book was of a very high quality, with c.80% of the allocation going to institutional investors and a broad geographic spread. 312 accounts placed orders.