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.
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