S&P Global Ratings provides GCC National Scale Ratings (NSR) for entities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), offering entities a greater differentiation among local credits within the Kingdom than is available on the global scale.
The scale helps issuers and investors within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to compare the relative credit risk of issuers and issuances and is expected to contribute to better informed, more liquid, and more efficient capital markets across the region.
The GCC NSR serves issuers, counterparties, intermediaries, investors, and insurers involved in GCC’s financial markets by providing independent opinions of relative creditworthiness for GCC-related issuers and issuances. The GCC regional rating scale is designed for issuers based in the GCC region and for capital markets debt, bank loans, and shariah-compliant obligations issued in GCC currencies by entities within and beyond the region.
GCC regional ratings may be useful to issuers, counterparties, intermediaries, investors, and insurers seeking credit ratings on GCC issuers and issuances relative to other issuers and issuances within the region. GCC regional ratings might be used for traditional capital markets debt and bank loans; as well as for shariah-compliant obligations.
GCC regional ratings are designed to serve as an independent benchmark and information tool for investors. They, and the GCC scale, may provide a complementary tool for rating local or regional currency issuance alongside the global ratings used for rating non-GCC currency-denominated issuers and issuances. GCC regional ratings and the GCC scale are designed to meet the needs of investors participating in national or regional GCC capital markets by providing finer distinctions of credit quality. Investors may use GCC regional ratings and the GCC scale to compare and contrast the relative creditworthiness of issuers and issuances.
Given the focus on credit quality within the GCC, they are not comparable to other regional or national scales.
The regional scale ratings could be assigned to any GCC-domiciled issuer including corporates, banks, insurance companies, and sovereigns at their request and would be identifiable by the prefix “gc” (for example, gcAA+) and feature both long and short-term ratings.
