UPDATE 3-Kookmin sells $1 bln worth of covered bonds

(Updates with final sale details)

By Rafael Nam and Carolyn Cohn

HONG KONG/LONDON May 6 (Reuters) - South Korea's Kookmin Bank sold $1 billion worth of five-year covered bonds at a discounted price of 98.68 on Wednesday, bringing a yield of 7.572 percent, according to a market source familiar with the deal.

The coupon on the new issue, which matures May 14, 2014, is 7.25 percent and has a spread of 550 basis points over the corresponding benchmark U.S. Treasury.

Interest in the deal was high with $6 billion in orders, approximately $2 billion of which came from the United States, $1 billion from Europe and the remainder from Asia, Thomson Reuters' IFR reported, citing buyside sources.

This is the first covered bond sale from Asia outside of Japan. A covered bond has other securities pledged as security against default. The deals typically receive a higher credit rating because the value of the pledged collateral exceeds the payments that the issuer owes to bondholders.

In Kookmin's case, the bonds are backed by 2 trillion won ($1.56 billion) in residential mortgage loans and 2.3 trillion won in credit card receivables originated in South Korea by Kookmin Bank.

Kookmin is a unit of KB Financial Group (105560.KS).

Kookmin's debt was rated 'AA' by Standard & Poor's, or three notches above the agency's 'A' rating for the lender. Moody's Investors Service assigned an 'Aa2' rating for the debt compared with its 'A2' Rating for the bank.

Lead managers of the deal are Citigroup (C.N) and HSBC (HSBA.L) (0005.HK). (Additional reporting by Daniel Bases in New York; Editing by James Dalgleish)