Twenty-three structured products, from 11 different providers and worth an estimated €216, were added to SRP's French database in December. Both issuance and sales were down from the previous month when 39 structured products with a sales volume of €665m were launched.

Morgan Stanley launched four products, including Euro Exigence Janvier 2016 and Euro Conviction Mars 2016. The products are both linked to the MSCI Euro 50 Select 4.75 Decrement index and have a term of ten years. The MSCI Euro 50 Select 4.75 Decrement is based on the MSCI EMU index - its parent index, which includes large and mid-cap stocks across the 10 Developed Markets countries in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) - and aims to capture the performance of the top 50 constituents in the MSCI EMU according to free float adjusted market cap applicable to foreign investors. However, at each quarterly rebalance date, all issuers in the index are weighted equally.

"The MSCI Euro 50 Select 4.75 is equally weighted in a universe which is very familiar to investors: the 50 largest capitalization in the Euro zone," said Romain Noirault, head of structured products marketing at Morgan Stanley's institutional equity division in Paris. "Historically, equal weighting in this universe enables an outperformance compared to a weighted index based on market capitalization."

Both products can be redeemed early - offering a coupon of 7% per year elapsed - if the index registers at or above its initial level on the annual observation date. Autocallables have been, and still are, the dominant payoff in France in recent years, featuring in almost 80 percent of all public offerings launched in 2015. "Autocallable structures continue to be popular due to their simplicity and potentially attractive yield levels and also, of course, they currently have very interesting entry levels," said Noirault. "On the other hand, some [of Morgan Stanley's] partners have started to work on longer-term solutions, still based on an annual or semi-annual coupon mechanism," he said.

Although issuance was on the up in France in 2015, sales volumes decreased from last year. Four-hundred and nine structured products worth €10bn had strike dates in 2015 compared to 291 structured products with a combined sales volume of €11bn which struck in 2014. Equities continued to dominate the French market. Ninety-six percent of all products issued in 2015 were either linked to a single index, single share, index basket or share basket. The Eurostoxx 50 was the most popular equity index, seen in 188 products, followed by the Euro iStoxx EWC 50 (40 products), Eurostoxx Select Dividend 30 (28 products) and the local Cac 40 (23 products) while Bouygues was the share most in demand with French investors (seven products).

Eighteen structured products, which sold a combined €708m during their respective subscription periods, reached their maturity in December. A grand total of 233 structured products (€16.5bn), including offerings from Aduléo, Auplata, Edrim Solutions, Generali and Richelieu Finance matured during the course of the year.

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