The miner’s finance arm notified fixed-income investors of the offer of senior unsecured medium-term notes early this morning.
The offering will be a benchmark five-year fixed-rate transaction, with ANZ and Commonwealth Bank of Australia as the joint lead managers.
Bloomberg reported that BHP was offering notes yielding about 95 basis points more than the asset swap rate, citing an anonymous source.
“BHP is a strong, highly rated company with good cash flows,” Kapstream Capital portfolio manager Mark Mitchell told Bloomberg in Sydney.
“Local investors like the name and are starved for non-financial issuers, so there is likely to be good demand for the deal.”
The offer comes less than a month after BHP priced $A5.2 billion of European and UK bonds to be used for working capital.
The miner issued over $7 billion of bonds in the first half of the year.
BHP Billiton Limited is rated A+/stable/A-1 by Standard & Poor’s and A1/stable/P-1 by Moody’s.
Shares in BHP last traded 1% higher at $33.56.
