China Huarong Asset Management, the biggest of four state-owned companies created in China in the late 1990s to remove bad loans from the books of the countrys biggest banks, reportedly has attracted approximately $2.4 billion from eight investors ahead of an expected initial public offering, the New York Times first reported.
The investors are: Goldman Sachs, Warburg Pincus, China Life Insurance, Citic Securities, the Malaysian state investment fund Khazanah Nasional, China International Capital Corp., the Cofco Group and Fosun International. Each investor's stake was not known.
Huarong was formed as a result of a government cleanup of the banking system as a depository for deadbeat loans that had been made by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Chinas biggest state-owned bank by assets.
Huarong would be the second of Chinas four state-asset management companies to go public, following China Cinda Asset Management, which
Strong investor enthusiasm greeted Cinda's IPO, indicating the bad-debt business could flourish if the world's No. 2 economy falters. Cindas stock is now up about 10% above its IPO price since it began trading.
Huarong has yet to make a public filing for its IPO, but it plans to list in Hong Kong before the end of the year, Lai Xiaomin, the companys chairman, said on Thursday at a briefing in Beijing, according to Bloomberg.
