(Bloomberg) -- Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is selling its first public dollar bonds in nearly four years, part of a dual-currency transaction by the Chinese internet heavyweight to repay offshore debt and repurchase equity.
The company has launched the sale of $2.65 billion of dollar notes in three parts, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private details. Pricing for the longest portion of the offering, a 30-year bond, is 1.05 percentage point above comparable Treasuries. Initial talk was a premium of around 1.30 percentage point.
The deal had attracted about $18 billion of orders by midday Tuesday, $13 billion of which was ahead of the US open.
Alibaba also priced 18 billion yuan ($2.5 billion) of notes offshore in four tranches, a separate person said. Bloomberg News reported last week that the company’s dual-currency offering could raise about $5 billion. Alibaba in May sold a $5 billion of convertible notes in a private offering.
A spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The offering comes as Chinese issuers have bolstered dollar-bond issuance as the country unveiled fresh stimulus efforts and the Federal Reserve started cutting its policy rate in the US. Sales more than doubled in October from a year earlier, also occurring as spreads on Asian issuers’ dollar notes were recently at their lowest-ever levels in the secondary market.
Meanwhile, Alibaba last week reported anemic growth in its core Chinese e-commerce business for the quarter ended Sept. 30, dragging on results that benefited from progress from international and cloud divisions.
(Updates with deal sizes in the second and fourth paragraphs.)
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