Looking back on 2003, what were the key trends in the debt markets
Williams 2003 was a strong year for the debt markets in Asia with the low interest rate environment driving G3 bond issuance to very high levels. Although we didn't see a great deal of capital expenditure-driven financing, partly because of the problems in the first half of the year created by geopolitical uncertainties and SARS, there was a significant amount of refinancing and terming out of debt.
In the second half of the year there was a belief that interest rates would not stay at such low levels so we saw a lot of pre-financing of debts...
