Special Report: UAE sets new trend in bond issues after Emirates' roaring success

The UAE's debt market is also maturing. Until Emirates airline entered the domestic bond market with a bang in 2001 garnering Dh1.5 billion - much more than the airline had initially planned, the financial centres, the world over, have never bothered to take UAE seriously.

But the thumping success, Emirates airline bond issue grabbed in the market, has indeed triggered the leaders in the financial service market to give a serious thought to bonds.

Big corporates, and even the government, have now begun looking up to bonds as their major source of their future funding requirements. UAE can now see a line-up of bonds waiting for take off in the immediate future.

It was the Emirates Bank Group (EBG) which decided to jump onto the bandwagon first by announcing a medium term note programme itself.

Interestingly, it was Dubai 2003 - the body set up to organise the World Bank-IMF conference in September 2003, which originally provoked the market with an announcement of a bond issue to part-finance the prestigious project of convening the World Bank-IMF meet in Dubai, where a lot of construction is involved.

Though Dubai 2003 announced that it would launch a bond to raise around Dh1.5 bond internationally by April 2002 itself, the plans are yet to take concrete form.