…Named best Rating Agency in APAC in record 5 categories
TUE, FEBRUARY 12 2019-theG&BJournal- Fitch has won the Credit Rating Agency of the Year (2018) awards for the corporate, investment-grade, public-finance, project-finance and sovereign categories.
It is the agency’s first award for the investment-grade category, and the fourth consecutive win for public finance.
Criteria for the awards included transparency of methodology and number of ratings conducted, default and stability studies, surveillance process, media and investor outreach. The judges also took into consideration the feedback from close to 700 institutional investors who responded to The Asset’s two fixed-income surveys.
Fitch reclaimed the corporate award that it won in 2015 and 2016, having “rated over USD70 billion of cross-border bonds issued by corporates in 2018 across Asia-Pacific, including those for marquee issuers with large deals in Reg S and/or 144A formats such as ChemChina, Tencent Holdings, PT Indonesia Asahan Aluminium and Baidu,” according to The Asset.
“These deals, plus its participation in rating sovereign deals for Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea, were also cited for selecting Fitch as the winner of the investment grade Rating Agency of the Year,” added The Asset.
Fitch was chosen as the top public-finance rating agency with “several investors citing its strong coverage of the local financing vehicle groups (LGFVs) in China.” The agency was also “recognised outside China and was selected to assign an international rating to the State of Kerala in India”.
The Asset also selected Fitch as project finance Rating Agency of the Year “with its coverage now including issuers across most infrastructure sectors – energy, renewables, toll roads, ports and airports.” Key Asian project-finance transactions that carry a Fitch rating include Adani Abbot Point Terminal, Paiton Energy, GMR Hyderabad International Airport, Star Energy, PT Pelabuhan Indonesia, and Shenzhen Expressway.
In the sovereign category, Fitch was awarded Rating Agency of the Year for the second year in a row for initiating a number of rating actions in 2018, including upgrades for Macau and Vietnam and downgrades for Sri Lanka and Pakistan.-FITCH.
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