The once rip-roaring IPO market may have slowed to crawl but that doesn’t mean we won’t be seeing any big offerings for the rest of 2015.
The Wall Street Journal reports that state-backed China Huarong Asset Management, one of, if not, the largest player in China’s distressed debt market, has been given the green light by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to IPO for as much as $3 billion – making its debut one of the biggest the region will see this year.
Beijing-based Huarong is one of the four distressed debt managers created by the nation to deal with state-owned banks’ growing pile of bad debt, and has been really successful at it according to Reuters:
The business has been a lucrative one for Huarong in China’s slowing economy, according to its IPO prospectus. The company’s distressed debt division, its core business, made a profit of 9.3 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) in 2014, up 22 percent from the previous year.
Huarong’s 2014 overall net profit was 13 billion yuan, up 30 percent from 2013. For the three months ended March 31, profit rose 42 percent to 4.9 billion yuan.
Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup, and ICBC are among the five banks advising the IPO.
Photo: Christopher Chan