The SEC jointly with the Thai Bond Market Association (ThaiBMA) launched ?One Step Beyond with Bond Issue? project to encourage the businesses that have never raised fund through bond issuance.  Also, ThaiBMA offered registration fee discount to those businesses issuing bonds within this year.

Vorapol Socatiyanurak, SEC Secretary-General, said that the SEC in collaboration with ThaiBMA launched a project called ?One step beyond with Bond Issue? to promote corporate fund raising through bond issuance especially those businesses that have never issued bonds. Nowadays, corporate bond issuance has become somewhat more popular fund raising channel as witnessed by the continuous increase in corporate bond market value. Survey on asset management companies indicated that mutual funds for accredited investors (AI funds) invested in more variety and more complex debt securities. On supply side, new bond issues from new issuers are accordingly in need.

?The SEC promotes diversity of fund raising channels for businesses. Bond issuance could support businesses to have better capital structure and also benefit the economy of the country in term of fund sourcing and allocation. Nonetheless, most of the companies either those listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand or non-listed have never once issued bonds, even though bond issuance is subject to fewer requirements than those apply to equity issuance. Thus, the project has been launched in attempt to promote advantages of bond issuance while the SEC has eased relevant regulations to simplify the process and revised mutual funds investment rules to facilitate investment in corporate bonds? Vorapol said.

Tada Phutthitada, The Thai Bond Market Association President, said that the Thai corporate bond market has been growing continuously. In 2014, the corporate bond value was 553.94 billion baht, more than 32 percent increase from the previous year. Moreover, some of long-term bonds were offered for sale by 24 first-time issuers while 56 companies were newcomers for short-term issues with the value of short-term issues totaling 1,184.85 billion baht. However, the bond issuers concentrated in a few business sectors whereas the small and medium sized companies rarely issued bonds. Actually, current circumstances tend to support corporate bond issuance; for example, low interest rate, more stringent practices of financial institutions in loan approval and decrease in issue size with increase in issuers. In this regard, ThaiBMA is pleased to support the project ?One step beyond with Bond Issue? to encourage companies to raise fund through bond issuance. ThaiBMA board of directors has approved a 20,000 baht registration fee exemption and a 10,000 baht discount for annual fee for new bond issuers participating in the project and issue long-term bonds within this year. The exemption and discount starts from the project commencement to December 30, 2015.