Saudi Arabia is considering borrowing more in currencies besides the dollar this year as it focuses on refinancing to reduce the portion of its outstanding floating-rate debt.
“We are not done with interest-rate risk,” Hani AlMedaini, chief executive officer of the country’s National Debt Management Center, said in an interview. “That’s why we were so fast to issue given the positive momentum in the market we witnessed at the beginning of 2023.”
Despite expecting another budget surplus in 2023, Saudi Arabia raised $10 billion from a bond sale in early January in the biggest emerging-market sovereign deal in almost three years. Soaring crude prices helped push the government’s finances into the black for the first time in nearly a decade last year.
The kingdom had already pre-funded about 48 billion riyals ($12.8 billion) of its refinancing needs for this year, and January’s bond sale means it’s done most of the borrowing it planned to do in 2023. Still, the government is looking at different borrowing options including euro or other international currencies, and also green bonds, said AlMedaini.
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