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Strategies & Market Trends : China Warehouse- More Than Crockery -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RealMuLan who wrote (2793)	3/12/2004 6:37:02 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6370

China Construction Bank Confirms IPO Mandates-Sources -2- HONG KONG (Dow Jones)--China Construction Bank (Q.CCB), the country's third-largest lender, Friday extended formal invitations to three investment banks to arrange its initial public offering, people involved with the deal said. The bank plans to become the first Chinese company to list in Hong Kong, the U.S. and on the mainland at the same time, by the end of this year at the earliest, the people said. ADVERTISEMENT The bank has chosen its 43.4%-owned investment bank China International Capital Corp., Morgan Stanley (MWD) and Citigroup (C) as listing sponsors to arrange its share sale, which could potentially be worth as much as US$10 billion. Morgan Stanley owns a 34.3% stake in CICC. In December, investment bankers went to Beijing to pitch for a role in the IPO, expected to be the largest since China Unicom's US$5.25 billion listing in 2000. However, the final list of mandated sponsors doesn't contain any surprises. Banking sources said as early as January that China Construction Bank President Zhang Enzhau had invited top-tier executives from Morgan Stanley, CICC and Citigroup to a meeting at Beijing's Diaoyutai State Guesthouse. Topics of discussion at the meeting included Citigroup's plan to take a stake in China Construction Bank, one person said. China Construction Bank is one of the nation's four major state-owned banks, which dominate the country's financial system. Its former role was primarily to disburse state construction funds, but the bank has since transformed itself into a major mortgage lender. It is considered to have a lower non-performing loan ratio than its peers: Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (Q.ICBC), Bank of China (Q.BCH) and Agricultural Bank of China (Q.AGBC). This implies it will require the least expensive restructuring effort ahead of an IPO and be the first of the four to go public. This year will mark a year of banking reform and restructuring in China, regarded as a critical step before the country's banks can go public and the major factor determining the exact timetable for listing. An early share offering for China Construction Bank would be an ambitious step in China's plans to reform its rickety financial sector. The country's chief bank regulator, Liu Mingkang, has said that listings are part of a larger reform plan that will include hiving off bad debts and capital injections from the government. Earlier in January, the government injected US$22.5 billion from China's foreign reserves into China Construction Bank. sg.biz.yahoo.com