Nitin Gadkari, India’s Minister of Road Transport & Highways and Minister of Shipping, in his self-assured style, tinged with a sense of humour, kick started the masala bond road show to raise capital for India’s highway infrastructure projects.
The Indian minister was assisted by Rohit Kumar Singh, Member (Finance), National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) at the event.
Rakshat Kapoor, Executive Director, Debt Capital Markets from Nomura’s investment banking team in India shared that the investor meets will move from Singapore to Wednesday, April 26 in Hong Kong and Monday, May 8 London.
Nomura, along with AXIS Bank, SBICAP and Standard Chartered Bank are Joint Book-runners and Lead Managers.
India has the second largest road network in the world at 5.2 million kilometres with 100K being highways, which carry 40 per cent of the country’s traffic. Considering the fast growing Indian economy, car market, high cost of logistics at 14 per cent of India’s GDP makes a compelling case for the country to focus on country’s highway infrastructure.
Also read: Masala bonds sale to mop up funds
NHAI has used the masala bond route successfully in the recent past with International Finance Corporation (IFC) in November 2014 for raising SGD 216 million approximately and earlier in March by Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) to raise SGDs 716 million.