China's Chongqing City Commercial Bank has won government approval to sell a 17 percent stake to Hong Kong's Dah Sing Banking Corp for about 700 million yuan, the bank's chairman said on Saturday. The bank is still awaiting the government's nod to sell a further 7.99 percent stake to the US private equity giant Carlyle Group and to then float shares in Hong Kong.
"Yes, we won approval this week to sell a stake to Dah Sing Bank, but the deal with Carlyle has yet to go through," Zhang Fu, chairman of the small western Chinese lender, told Reuters on the sidelines of a financial forum. He said the bank would sell a stake to Dah Sing for about 2 yuan per share and confirmed that it was applying for a Hong Kong listing.
Financial industry sources told Reuters last month that the lender was looking to raise roughly HK$2 billion (US $256 million) in its initial public offering (IPO) later this year. Several global investment banks, including Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, have shown interest in underwriting the IPO of the bank, which is run by the government of Chongqing city, according to the sources.
Lehman Brothers represented Chongqing Bank in its negotiations last year with Carlyle and Dah Sing so might have a better chance to win the deal, sources said. China caps foreign investment in a domestic bank at 25 percent. No single foreign investor may own more than 20 percent.
Now that almost all big Chinese banks have sold stakes to foreign strategic investors, overseas buyers are turning their attention to smaller city and regional banks. A number of second-tier Chinese banks are expected to list in Hong Kong this year.
Bank of Beijing, which is 19.9 percent-owned by Dutch financial services firm ING, has chosen Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citic Securities to underwrite an IPO worth between $750 million and $1 billion this year. CITIC Bank, the country's seventh-largest by assets, plans to raise about $3 billion in a dual Hong Kong and Shanghai listing this year. It also sold a 4.83 percent stake to Spain's Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria.
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