Ivory Coast Bond Orders More than Six times Issue Size

Ivory Coast received orders for a $750 million dollar bond of more than six times the issue size, one of the lead managers said on Wednesday.

Ivory Coast launched the 10-year bond late on Wednesday at a yield of 5.625 percent, 3-1/2 years after civil war led it to default on restructured dollar debt.

Nicholas Samara, at Citi, told Reuters in a telephone interview that orders totalled $4.75 billion.

BNP Paribas and Deutsche were the other lead managers.

Investors scrambling for yield have lapped up bonds from sub-Saharan African sovereigns in recent years, leading analysts to warn about the dangers of these borrowers accumulating too much debt.

The world's biggest cocoa grower, which gained ratings of B/B1 with positive outlook from Fitch and Moody's ahead of the bond launch, will see GDP growth of at least 10 percent this year, its prime minister said.

"We expect double digit growth this year," Daniel Kablan Duncan told Reuters in the same telephone interview.

"We can use the bond proceeds to finance investments in infrastructure and a small part of it to improve our debt profile."

Duncan said the country's debt-to-GDP ratio currently stood at 44 percent.

Since assuming power in 2011 following a brief post-election civil war, the government of President Alassane Ouattara has invested heavily in reviving long-neglected infrastructure, building highways and bridges and overhauling the country's power grid.

(By Carolyn Cohn; Additional reporting by Joe Bavier in Abidjan; Editing by Alison Williams)