Indonesia retail bond issuance raises 26t rupiah

[JAKARTA] Indonesia raised 26 trillion rupiah (S$2.44 billion) from the government's first retail bond issuance in 2021 as part of efforts to finance its programmes including to combat the coronavirus, the Finance Ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The bonds, the largest sold in an online offering, carried a fixed coupon rate of 5.57 per cent and have a tenure of three years, maturing in February 2024, according to the ministry.

The coupon was the lowest on record for tradable retail Indonesian government bonds.

"We see that during the pandemic period, it seems that people are still holding back their spending," Antonius Dyan, an official at the ministry's budget financing department, said in an official post on social media.

He said that investors preferred to put their extra cash into government bonds at the beginning of this year as they were not able to spend it during the holidays due to Covid-19.

South-east Asia's biggest economy has said it planned to issue five more retail bonds around March, July, September, October and November to help finance its state budget.

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On Monday, the ministry said millennial investors made up 37.5 per cent of the 48,731 buyers of the bonds, nearly matching the portion of investors aged between 54-74 years old, the traditional buyers of government notes.

Indonesia aims to issue around 70 trillion to 80 trillion rupiah in retail bonds this year.

REUTERS