Tencent to sell $5b bonds on Jan 19

China's tech giant Tencent is expected to sell four tranches of bonds worth $5 billion on Jan 19, according to the company's announcement last Friday.

The 4 tranches include 5-, 10-, and 20-year fixed-rate bonds at 2.985 percent, 3.595 percent, and 3.925 percent, respectively, and 5-year floating-rate bonds at 0.605 percent over three-month LIBOR.

Currently, Tencent’s bond rates are above US Treasury securities.

The bonds selling plan is part of the company's $10 billion medium-term bonds issuing plan announced last Tuesday.

According to Bloomberg, the Tencent deal attracted orders totaling more than $41 billion, and nearly half of investors are from the US.

The global rating agency Moody's has assigned a rating of A2, meaning low risk of default, to the Tencent bonds. The rating is one level below China's business titan Alibaba's bonds, issued last November.

Last year, Chinese companies issued a record high of $180 billion US dollar-denominated bonds in overseas markets, a 70 percent surge from 2016 , according to a Xinhua news agency report citing Bloomberg's data.

This year, the size is expected to reach $200 billion, the Xinhua report stated based on remarks from industry insiders.