Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb says Pakistan will issue yuan-denominated panda bonds as early as June to further integrate its capital markets with China. In an exclusive interview with South China Morning Post, he said Pakistan aims to raise 200- 250 million dollars from Chinese investors, emphasizing that it was absolutely critical for the nation to diversify its funding base. Muhammad Aurangzeb also pledged more cooperation with Beijing on the next phase of the China\u2013Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). He also called for more participation from China\u2019s private sector and export-led industries to transform Pakistan\u2019s economy. Aurangzeb said Pakistan aimed to raise US$200 million to US$250 million from Chinese investors, adding that it was \u201cabsolutely critical\u201d for the nation to diversify its funding base. The minister is in Hong Kong for the two-day Asian Financial Forum, which began on Monday. \u201cSince I took over [in March 2024], I have been very vocal about this \u2013 that we want to go for panda bonds, an inaugural sovereign panda bond \u2026 I\u2019m pushing everyone, including our own teams, to see if we can get this done before June,\u201d Aurangzeb said. Panda bonds \u2013 typically denominated in yuan and issued in China by non-Chinese organisations, have gained traction as traders and countries seek to diversify from an over-reliance on the US dollar, while tapping into the world\u2019s second-largest economy at attractive rates. The minister added that Pakistan had followed Egypt\u2019s lead to issue the yuan bonds on the back of credit improvement from the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Last year, Egypt received guarantees from the AIIB and the African Development Bank, covering principal and interest, to issue panda bonds on the local mainland China market. \u201cI\u2019ve met the president of the AIIB in Washington \u2026 with a very clear view that we will replicate what Egypt did in terms of the credit enhancement \u2026 which allows us to access the local capital markets for the panda bond,\u201d he said. Aurangzeb added that Pakistan would help to support the \u201cinternationalisation of the renminbi\u201d and boost cooperation with the \u201csecond-largest and second-deepest capital market in the world\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb says Pakistan will issue yuan-denominated panda bonds as early as June to further integrate its capital markets with China. In an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22273,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news-updates"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}