CICC chairman set to join Asian infrastructure bank
Resignation after one year in the job follows leaving of princeling chief executive Levin Zhu
A day after losing its chief executive, sources said China International Capital Corp (CICC) is set to lose its chairman.
Contrary to speculation that he is stepping down because he has reached retirement age, the 65-year-old Jin is said to be leaving to join the proposed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank initiated by China, serving as its first president.
A source at CICC told the South China Morning Post that unlike state-owned companies, CICC has no retirement age and Jin’s leaving is not retirement-related.
Besides Jin and Zhu, CICC this year lost Jiang Guorong, co-head of investment banking, and Marshall Nicholson, co-head of international investment banking.
“The reshuffle at CICC obviously could be seen as a sign that the government will intensify efforts to let market forces, rather than powerful people like princelings, decide the direction of state-owned businesses,” said Liu Kaiming, a director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a non-government organisation.
The outgoing princeling chief executive, Zhu, was credited with using his clout and connections to secure mega underwriting deals from state-owned juggernauts such as China Unicom that once made CICC a formidable force on the mainland.
CICC’s chief operating officer Lin Shoukang is taking over from Zhu as acting chief executive, the firm said in a statement on Monday. It also expressed gratitude to Zhu for his contributions to the company in the past 16 years.
The recent management changes cast doubt over the planned listing of CICC, the first Sino-foreign investment bank set up by Morgan Stanley and China Construction Bank in 1995.
The company has already been facing intense competition with the rise of similar entities eating into its once-monopoly position in the market.
Its famed prowess to sign up state-owned enterprises seeking to raise funds has also waned as most big state-owned enterprises have already gone public in the past decade.
The company topped the rankings of Hong Kong’s equity capital market in 2009, but has struggled to get mandates for block trades and follow-on share sales, partly due to its limited client base and internal power struggles, said people familiar with the firm.
The prevalent view in the market is that CICC missed the window of opportunity to list its shares when enthusiasm for mainland banks was high. It has also lagged behind its major rivals Citic Securities and Haitong Securities that went public in 2011 and 2012, respectively, in Hong Kong.
CICC was ranked in the 17th spot in the underwriters’ league tables in Hong Kong and the mainland this year, dropping out of the Top 10 list for the first time since 2009, according to data from Dealogic.
Morgan Stanley sold its 34.3 per cent stake in CICC to four investors, including US private equity firms KKR and TPG Capital, for US$1 billion in 2010, after investing US$35 million in 1995 when it was started.
