Ford Offering $2.5B Green Bonds to Help Finance EV Effort
Get Ford Motor Company Report offered a $2.5 billion unsecured green bond to investors, days after the American car maker launched its sustainable-financing framework and said it would buy back higher-priced debt.
The move comes as President Joe Biden is set to sign the administration's $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which includes major funding for electric-vehicle and other clean-energy projects.
Ford said that it would allocate proceeds from the bond offering to fund investment in its battery-powered electric vehicle portfolio.
“We’re again putting our money where our mouth is, prioritizing and allocating capital to environmental and social initiatives that are good for people, good for the planet, and good for Ford,” said John Lawler, Ford's chief financial officer.
Corporate green bonds have become more popular in recent years, with the debt instruments in the U.S. having raised nearly $59 billion in proceeds in 90 offerings so far this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
That total is more than double from a year earlier, when green-bond issuance totaled $28.7 billion in the U.S. In 2019 that total was $22.4 billion.
Last week, Ford said that it planned to sell at least $1 billion of green bonds as part of a bigger plan to more than halve its borrowing costs by repurchasing $5 billion of junk-rated debt.
Nov. 10, 2021