Baidu, China’s leading search engine, has raised $1bn in a heavily oversubscribed bond sale on strong appetite from investors even as its shares have been hit by Beijing’s regulatory crackdown on tech groups.
The debt sale attracted between $5bn and $6bn of orders, according to two bankers who worked on the deal.
The dollar debt issuance comes as Chinese authorities have engaged in a sweeping 10-month campaign targeting the country’s largest technology companies. Baidu’s shares are down by a third this year, while on Thursday the Hong Kong-listed stock of Alibaba fell to its lowest level since the ecommerce group’s secondary listing in the city in 2019.