Public offering of the mainland's oldest securities house could jump-start a staff incentive scheme
China International Capital Corp (CICC), the mainland's oldest and most successful Sino-foreign joint-venture investment bank, may go public next year to become the first Hong Kong-listed mainland securities house.
Moderate immediate capital need for business expansion has led the Beijing-based firm to shelve an earlier proposal for a private share placement and fast forward to the listing, sources said.
'More than fresh capital, public flotation could provide an exit route for some of its private equity shareholders, jump-start a staff incentive scheme and help improve its corporate governance,' a banker close to CICC said.
A detailed initial public offering plan has yet to be worked out but the nation's largest investment bank favours Hong Kong as a listing venue to circumvent domestic restrictions on management incentive schemes and to raise its international brand awareness, a second source said.
Benchmarking against the valuations of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley shares in the United States, a standard 25 per cent public float could raise $1 billion based on CICC's end-of-December book value of 2.02 billion yuan.
Morgan Stanley, the Government of Singapore Investment Corp (GIC) and Hong Kong's Mingly Corp, part of the Cha Group of companies, won special central government approval to set up CICC with China Construction Bank (CCB) in 1995, seven years before a mainland regulation made such Sino-foreign joint-venture investment banks possible without special state consent.