In Hong Kong's BEA Union Investment, Pheona Tsang is becoming creative. The head of fixed income plans to fill 10% of the yuan-based portfolio in the form of dollar bonds, which are sold by Chinese companies outside the mainland market this year.
She is not alone. Many fund managers have been attracted to the same bonds because of years of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, and their yields have been steadily rising.
According to data released by Natixis, the average yield of these US dollar bonds was 6.7% in December, up 2.8 percentage points from the same month in China, which lagged behind its domestic counterparts only 12 months ago.
Last month, China Evergrande Group, one of China's largest indebted real estate developers, sold $3 billion of bonds in Asia's largest overseas high-yield bond offerings so far this year, yielding a yield of up to 10%.
China's shift to a more relaxed monetary policy to cushion the economic cooling has pushed the market around. This helped drive down interest rates and cut 10-year government bond yields by 60 basis points from September highs.
Jason Pang, portfolio manager at JPMorgan Chase Asset Management, said: "Land interest rates have been so widely compressed that valuations are too high."
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