BEIJING, April 10 (Xinhua) -- Foreign institutions showed more interest in China's bonds in March, with their cash bond trading on the interbank market up 165 percent year on year to 922.6 billion yuan, according to data released by China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) Thursday.
Their cash bond transaction, which was 54 percent up from February, accounted for four percent of the aggregate cash bond turnover on interbank market last month.
Foreign institutional investors made 461.1 billion yuan of bond purchasing and 461.5 billion yuan of bond selling in March, producing 400 million yuan of net selling.
In terms of different market entrances, 444.4 billion yuan of their cash bond transactions were reached through settlement service agencies and resulted in a net buying of 29.1 billion yuan. The remaining 478.2 billion yuan of transactions were realized via the Bond Connect, a program between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong allowing investors to trade bonds on each other's interbank bond markets, and resulted in 29.5 billion yuan of net selling.
Among the different products, foreign institutions favored bonds with sound liquidity such as policy bank bond, Chinese government bond (CGB) and negotiable certificate of deposit (NCD), whose turnovers accounted in total 96 percent of their monthly trading and respectively for 41 percent, 38 percent and 17 percent of the total.
Source: Xinhua Finance
Terms to maturity of their favored bond products span mainly from less than 1 year, 1-3 years, 3-5 years and 7-10 years, whose turnovers took up respectively 31 percent, 12 percent, 15 percent and 34 percent.
By the end of March, 443 and 520 foreign institutional investors had entered China's interbank bond market via settlement service agencies and the Bond Connect program respectively, two and nine ones more than the comparable data by the end of February.
CFETS, as an important financial infrastructure in China, provides a series of services covering issuance, trade, post-trade processing, information, benchmark and training services for interbank foreign exchange market, money market and bond market. (Edited by Duan Jing with Xinhua Silk Road, duanjing@xinhua.org)
A single purchase
