Agricultural Bank of China Ltd (中國農民銀行) boosted the size of its initial public offering to US$22.1 billion after selling more stock in Shanghai, making it the world’s largest first-time share sale.
China’s biggest lender by customers sold a further 3.34 billion shares at the IPO price of 2.68 yuan apiece, it said in a stock exchange filing today. That increased the Shanghai portion of the lender’s IPO to 67.6 billion yuan (US$9.9 billion).
The expansion propels Agricultural Bank’s IPO past Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Ltd’s (中國工商銀行) US$21.9 billion sale in 2006 to become the world’s largest. The bank raised US$20.8 billion selling shares in Hong Kong and Shanghai last month as chairman Xiang Junbo (項俊波) braved a stock-market rout that drove the Chinese benchmark index to a 15-month low.
Agricultural Bank has declined 0.4 percent since its July 15 debut in Shanghai, while in Hong Kong, where the stock started trading a day later, the shares have advanced 3.7 percent. Domestic investors ordered more than 10 times the stock available to them.
The Beijing-based lender is the last major Chinese bank to sell shares to the public, wrapping up a decade-long overhaul of the nation’s banking industry that cost the government an estimated US$650 billion in restructuring costs.
China’s five biggest banks intend to raise a total of US$63 billion this year by selling bonds and shares to replenish capital eroded by a record US$1.4 trillion of new loans last year.
The IPO of Agricultural Bank, makes China home to four of the world’s 10 biggest banks by market value.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained