Catenaa, Monday, March 03, 2025- Baidu plans to offer about $ 1.4 billion of bonds offshore, a report by Bloomberg said on Monday, as the company has security payments due in April.
Quoting people familiar with the matter, the report said, the operator of China’s leading search engine, plans to issue 10 billion yuan of bonds, which include 5 and 0 year notes for debt financing.
The report said the deal will consist of a 5-year note to yield 2.6% to 2.8%, and a 10-year security at 2.8% to 3.0%, may price on Wednesday.
Accordingly, the size has increased from earlier discussions where Bloomberg reported that Baidu is planning to offer at least 4 billion yuan worth of bonds.
This would be Baidu’s first bond offering since 2021, and data compiled by Bloomberg showed that the company needs to repay a $ 600 million security due April 7.
Other Chinese tech companies have been active in debt financing markets recently, where Alibaba Group priced about $ 5 billion worth of dollar and yuan bonds in November. That was its first public note offering in nearly four years after it also sold $5 billion of convertible securities in a private offering in May.
The financings come at a time when major industry players on both sides of the Pacific have rolled out AI models at a rapid clip, from OpenAI to Alibaba.
The series of introductions underscore a dramatically quickened pace of development since DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with a model that matched the best from OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc.
