Antam to sell $150m in dollar bonds

Antam to sell $150m in dollar bonds

State-owned gold and nickel miner, PT Aneka Tambang (Antam), plans to sell dollar-denominated bonds to help fund a ferronickel project on Sulawesi island.

The company will use proceeds from the bond sale and a loan from PT Bank Mandiri, the country's biggest bank, for the expansion, said Antam president director Aditya Sumanagara in an e-mailed statement.

"We believe using the most favorable combination of a bank loan and corporate bonds will provide us with the low cost of debt and strong cash flows we need," he said.

Antam, which isn't rated by Moody's Investors Service or Standard & Poor's, joins Indonesian companies seeking to capitalize on investor appetite for higher-yielding corporate debt amid a decline in global interest rates.

Antam has met with 11 investment banks on the sale, it said, without elaborating. The company may sell as much as $150 million of bonds. Bank Mandiri in April agreed to lend Antam as much as $150 million for the ferronickel project, which will cost about $230 million.

Southeast Asia's second-biggest publicly traded miner produced 8,804 tons of contained nickel in 2002. Antam is expected to boost production capacity to 26,000 tons a year from 11,000 tons when its new smelter is completed. -- Bloomberg