Linklaters advises HSBC on POSCO International’s KRW 140bn digital bond issuance

Linklaters has advised The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC) as sole lead manager on the approximately KRW 140bn (approximately US$100m) digital bond issuance by POSCO International, representing South Korea’s first digital bond issuance by a non-financial company and the second digital bond issuance overall.

The bonds were issued using HSBC Orion*, HSBC’s tokenisation platform linked to the Central Moneymarkets Unit (CMU).

Linklaters’ cross-jurisdictional team was led by partner and Head of Korea Capital Markets Daniel Kwon, and Hong Kong SAR-based capital markets partner Hanwen Yu, with support from Jaewon Chang, Jun Park and Lily Wang.

With over 50 years’ experience in Hong Kong SAR and across Asia, Linklaters is at the forefront of digital innovation and provides clients with high quality, comprehensive legal support in their international capital markets transactions. Our recent deals include advising on Korea’s first digitally native bond issuance, the Hong Kong SAR Government’s largest ever digital green bond offering, Qatar’s first digitally native notes issuance and the first public offering of digitally native bonds by a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

_{* HSBC Orion refers to the distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform deployed by HSBC to CMU as the DLT platform operator for the purposes of, among other things, creating and settling the digitally native notes.}