(Bloomberg) -- The New Development Bank, a financial institution created by the BRICS bloc of emerging markets, raised 1.5 billion rand ($79 million) at its first-ever South African bond auction. 

Shanghai-based NDB, established by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, received more than 2.5 billion rand of bids for the three- and five-year bonds, enabling it to increase the size of the deal. It allocated 71% to institutional investors and the rest to local banks in Tuesday’s sale, it said in a statement Wednesday.

“NDB is seeking to increase its presence in the local capital markets of its member countries, to fund its robust portfolio of local currency loans,” said Leslie Maasdorp, NDB’s chief financial officer. “The proceeds will be used to fund infrastructure and sustainable development projects in South Africa.”

The sale was arranged by Standard Bank Group and Absa Group. Mamokete Lijane, global markets strategist at Standard Bank, told a Bloomberg event in Johannesburg Wednesday that there’s a substantial pool of available capital that ends up gravitating toward credit.

(Corrects conversion to dollars in headline and first paragraph in story originally published Aug. 16.)

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