The Asia Pacific Secondary Bond Market

• The outstanding size of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) cross-border corporate bond secondary market is approximately $2.5 trillion, consisting of 8,500 outstanding issues.  
• Most of the outstanding APAC G3 corporate bonds are denominated in USD (90%). Meanwhile, only 8% are in EUR and 2% are in GBP denominations.
• From 2011 to 2017, the annual APAC corporate issuance in USD, EUR, and GBP has experienced a threefold increase to reach $930 billion in 2017.
• China bond entities made up over 40% of the total issuance in 2017, larger than their share of 20% in 2011.  
• The market report covered G3 (USD, EUR, GBP) denominated bonds of non-financial and financial corporate issuers within the region.
• The electronic trading ranges from 10% to 40% of secondary market activity in APAC. This is lower than the trading rate in the U.S. and in Europe.
• The Asian Bond Markets Initiative saw the fourth bond issuance that was covered by the "ASEAN+3 Multi-Currency Bond Issuance Framework" in March 2019.
• The issuance was made by Singapore-based CJ Logistics Asia Pte. Ltd. with SGD70 million worth of 5-year bonds.
• In Cambodia, microfinance firm LOLC (Cambodia) released KHR80 billion worth of bonds in April 2019 which were traded under the Cambodia Securities Exchange in May.
• Meanwhile, emerging East Asia’s local currency (LCY) bond market grew to $15.0 trillion at the end of March 2019.
• The region’s bond market increased by 2.9% quarter-on-quarter during the first three months of 2019.
• Meanwhile, LCY growth reached 14.0% on a year-on-year basis.

Proprietary Database Search Results

Summary of Findings:

• Our one hour of research provided some of the available statistics on the size of the Asia-Pacific cross border corporate bond secondary market and other related data.
• However, we were not able to find the specific market size of the overall secondary bond market in the region.