Bangkok Commercial Asset Management Pcl (BCAM), Thailand's largest bad debt management firm, plans to raise about $500 million to $1 billion from an initial public offering (IPO) on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, IFR reported.
BCAM is the market leader in bad debt management in Thailand. The share offer, expected to be launched in early 2017, will be the first IPO of an impaired-assets manager in Southeast Asia, IFR said, without citing sources.
Thailand's Kasikorn Securities, Trinity Securities and UBS have been hired to manage the IPO, according to IFR, a Thomson Reuters publication.
The company declined to comment, given the listing plan is pending approval from the market regulator.
Thailand's military government approved the listing last year.
BCAM is wholly owned by the Financial Institutions Rehabilitation and Development Fund (FIDF), a unit of the Bank of Thailand, which helped bail out Thai banks after their bad debts ballooned during Asian financial crisis in 1997.
BCAM was set up in 1998 to manage bad loans from the now defunct Bangkok Bank of Commerce (BBC), whose collapse sparked a crisis in Thailand's financial sector.
It was merged with another asset management company, AMC, in 2005 and registered as a public company in December 2015.
In a preliminary regulatory filing, the company planned to issue 1.53 billion shares, of which 1.255 billion would be secondary and 280 million primary, IFR said.