ONE of Asia's best-performing bond managers offloaded his holdings of Huawei Technologies Co debt last week, underscoring investor concerns over potentially devastating US curbs on the Chinese tech giant.
Dhiraj Bajaj, whose Lombard Odier Asia Value Bond Fund outperformed 98 per cent of peers this year, sold the fund's Huawei 2026 dollar notes after the Trump administration placed the company on a blacklist that curtails access to US suppliers. The bonds posted record declines last week and recently traded at around 95 cents on the dollar, a slump that's been mirrored in notes of some Huawei suppliers."Directly targeting a national champion of this scale, which employs 180,000 people, is unprecedented," Mr Bajaj said."The US stance to severely limit Huawei's business capabilities has quite naturally surprised credit investors.
"Huawei has a strong financial position and access to a strong and large domestic market, but the impact of the supply chain disruption needs to be understood," said Mr Bajaj, whose US$1.3 billion fund has gained 10 per cent this year and had about 0.5 per cent of its assets invested in Huawei bonds at the end of March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BLOOMBERG