Taiwan’s domestic equities market is a hotbed of competition, with plenty of small deals to go around, but almost as many firms competing for them. Fubon Financial Holdings, China Development Financial, Hua Nan Commercial Bank and Taishin Financial Holdings are just some of the firms pitching hard for business. But Yuanta Securities, with Ted Ho in the chair, can rightly claim to be the stand out.
The firm undoubtedly had a stellar 2016. The 26 deals it worked on were a few less than its domestic rivals, but its $645 million of apportioned league table credit blew the competition out of the water, according to Dealogic data. Fubon was next in line, but its $466 million of deal credit showed the gulf Yuanta was able to create over the last year.
The deciding factor, as is often the case in Asia’s domestic markets, was a single deal. And true to form for Taiwan’s market, that single deal was a convertible bond.
Pushing ahead
When Taiwan Mobile launched a T$10 billion ($313.8 million) convertible bond in November 2016, it was pushing ahead with far and away the largest transaction of the year. But it chose to mandate just one firm to handle the equity-linked deal: Yuanta Securities.
That showed Yuanta has the chops to get business done on its own, but the firm also won an impressive recent mandate with a pair of foreign houses. DBS and UBS were its joint bookrunner partners on Nanya Technology Corp’s $500 million convertible bond, the borrower’s convertible debut and the largest deal of the year in Taiwan.
Yuanta has certainly not had a blow-out year in 2017. It missed out on a T$13 billion follow-on in the shares of Roo Hsing that helped Fubon Financial Holding take the top slot on the league table. But its work on Nanya’s convertible — undoubtedly the deal to win this year — helped make up for that somewhat.
Ask Taiwanese traders for their broker of choice and Yuanta’s name usually comes up first. The firm has long had a reputation for setting the agenda in Taiwan’s domestic market and that leading position looks unlikely to slip anytime soon.