Qatar selling treasury bills to create rial debt market

Qatar has been selling as much as US$1.1 billion (Dh4.04bn) in treasury bills each month since May as it strives to be the first GCC state to develop a local currency debt market.

"Qatar does not need to raise funding but having a treasury-bills market can help build bonds, manage liquidity constraints and be developed into a broader local debt market to allow corporates and even financial institutions to raise local currency money from local markets," said Simon Williams, the chief Middle East and North Africa region economist at HSBC.

"It's something the region is clearly in need of and whoever pushes ahead with first will have a significant advantage over competitors in the region."

Governments in the region have been talking for years about the need to build local debt markets to help to reduce a reliance on global investment and free up cash for local firms.

But Qatar is one of the few states to have made significant progress. It has been gradually increasing treasury-bill sales during the past year and announced plans in December to list treasury bills on the Qatar Exchange as a "first step toward starting a secondary market".

Treasury bills are one of the components needed for the development of a yield curve for government debt, composed of short- to long-term securities.

Their sales should help to soak up excess cash from the country's banking system, says the central bank. The country's banks held treasury bills valued at 8bn Qatari rials (Dh8bn) at the end of September.

But officials also hope the move will make it easier for local companies to come to the market with debt sales. At the moment, many are reliant on bank funding, which wavered last year as a result of the euro-zone debt crisis.

"Typically, local treasury bills are used as a liquidity management tool. When a central bank wants to drain liquidity from the system they will sell to banks and if they want to add liquidity back into the system they can buy them back, " said Nick Stadtmiller, the head of fixed-income research at Emirates NBD.

"The majority of Qatar treasury bills are held by Qatari banks," he added.

"The rial's peg to the US dollar means they are less exciting for international investors as they are not getting currency exposure."

Qatari companies and banks were inactive in the debt market last year, unlike firms in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Doha Bank, the fifth-largest Qatari lender by assets, is due to hold a meeting with investors today about a possible bond sale, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

"Prospects for corporate issuance from the country remain strong, particularly from banks," wrote Raza Agha, the senior economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland, in a research note last month.

tarnold@thenational.ae