Zambia to re-finance $2.8 billion Eurobonds in 2017, Nigeria targets 2.1 mln b/d in January

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Zambia plans to refinance Eurobonds totalling around $2.8 billion that it issued between 2012 and 2015, Finance Minister Felix Mutati said on Wednesday.

“The strategy for the Eurobonds next year is refinancing. We want to refinance the Eurobonds and get longer dated bonds at a bit of lower cost so that we minimise our debt,” Mutati told reporters.

Mutati said the equivalent of 19 percent of Zambia’s gross domestic product (GDP) was being used to service debt.

“We want to reduce that from around 19 percent to somewhere around 15 percent so that the release of resources can be used to support the vulnerable,” he said.

Zambia issued a $750 million Eurobond in 2012 followed by another amounting to $1 billion in 2014 and another worth $1.25 billion last year, mainly for infrastructure projects.

Nigeria hopes to boost its oil production to 2.1 million barrels per day next month, the country’s oil minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said on Wednesday.

Kachikwu also said he was expecting more production cuts from non-OPEC producers at Saturday’s meeting of oil producers in Vienna, and that he hoped to see oil prices at $60 a barrel by December 2017.

Kachikwu was speaking at a Bloomberg Markets summit in Abu Dhabi.

Nigeria’s output is at 1.9 million bpd with all three of its main fields online, the minister said on Monday.