greater china

Fund’s Debut in Thailand Raises Hopes

BANGKOK — Soaring stock markets in Southeast Asia could get a surge of new listings this year, after a record initial public offering in Thailand rose by more than a fifth in its first day of trading Friday.

The price of units of BTS Rail Mass Transit Growth Infrastructure fund rose as much as 22 percent before closing up 13 percent in the first day of trading Friday. The fund, which is controlled by BTS Group, raised $2.1 billion this month in the largest I.P.O. by a Thai company. It was an exceptional gain for such a large offering, which had already been priced at the top of its marketed range — a good signal for other companies with plans to list in Thailand this year.

The BTS fund offering was the largest I.P.O. in Asia, excluding Japan, so far this year. It followed a string of successful listings in Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, where stock markets are also soaring.

“Several countries, especially in Southeast Asia, are spending a lot of money on infrastructure,” said Kasem Prunratanamala, the head of research of CIMB Securities in Bangkok. “When the stock markets are performing well like this, the launch of an infrastructure fund will be a good option for companies to raise money.”

LT Group, which owns Philippines Airlines and is controlled by the billionaire Lucio Tan, raised $912 million in one of the biggest stock offerings in the Philippines on Wednesday. In Jakarta, Matahari Department Store raised $1.3 billion in March, while Mapletree Greater China Commercial Trust pocketed $1.3 billion from a Singapore I.P.O. in February.

Companies planning to list in Thailand this year include Bangkok Airways, Nok Air, the power producer CK Power, the industrial developer Amata VN and the Malaysian bank CIMB Group.

Listings in Thailand reached an all-time high of $10 billion in 2012, according to Thomson Reuters data. New issues have totaled $3.9 billion so far this year, on pace to surpass a record set last year.

The Thai stock market has risen 9.9 percent so far this year. The Indonesian stock market has gained 16 percent this year and rose to an all-time high in the past week. Shares in the Philippines, which received its first investment-grade credit rating in March, are up 18 percent.

The buoyant markets have prompted banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs to shuffle staffs and increase hiring in a bid to gain new businesses.

With a rising middle class, fast-growing economies and large populations, Southeast Asian nations are also receiving new attention from private equity firms. Carlyle Group recently hired Rajiv Louis, a banker with a decade of deal-making experience in Indonesia, to be its country head in Indonesia.

Completed Southeast Asia mergers and acquisitions rose from less than $100 million in the first quarter of 2009 to $1.8 billion in the first quarter of 2013, according to Reuters data. The volume of deals in the region in the past two years totaled $113 billion, compared with volume of just $20 billion in the preceding six years, the data show.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/business/global/funds-debut-in-thailand-raises-hopes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

DealBook: Chinese Companies Head For the Exit

HONG KONG–Fed up with slumping share prices, prickly regulators and aggressive short sellers, an increasing number of Chinese companies listed on American stock exchanges are heading for the exits.

The most recent case is also the biggest yet. On Wednesday, the directors of Focus Media Holdings, a display advertising company based in Shanghai, whose shares had come under attack by short-sellers, said they had accepted a sweetened $3.7 billion privatization bid from a buyout group that included the American private equity giant Carlyle Group, several Chinese private equity firms and the company’s chairman.

The deal would delist the company from Nasdaq. It includes $1.5 billion in debt financing from a consortium of Wall Street banks and mainly state-owned Chinese lenders and would rank as China’s biggest-ever leveraged buyout. Pending shareholders’ approval, the company expects the transaction to close in the second quarter of next year.

Including the Focus Media deal, which was first announced in August, Chinese companies began a record $5.8 billion worth of privatization bids in the first nine months of the year, according to the data provider Dealogic. That was a 42 percent increase from the same period a year earlier, and proposed Chinese delistings accounted for a record 16 percent of such transactions globally during the period, up from 6 percent a year earlier.

‘‘A lot of Chinese entrepreneurs want out of the U.S. markets. Share prices are depressed, and there are a lot of these deals in the pipeline,’’ said David Brown, greater China private equity practice leader at the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Valuations of companies from China that are listed in the United States have come under pressure in recent years after a wave of allegations of fraud and other accounting scandals. The Securities and Exchange Commission has deregistered the securities of nearly 50 China-based companies and has filed about 40 related fraud cases.

At the same time, a cross-border regulatory dispute over auditing procedures for Chinese companies listed in the United States escalated this month, when the S.E.C. charged the Chinese affiliates of the world’s four biggest accounting companies with violating securities law for failing to turn over documents related to their auditing work on businesses in China.

The standoff between United States and Chinese regulators over the auditing issue has raised concerns among multinational corporations that operate in both countries.

‘‘Failure to reach an agreement will create regulatory dead zones that harm investors and businesses,’’ the United States Chamber of Commerce said last week in a letter to securities regulators in Beijing and Washington. ‘‘The threat of retaliatory actions by regulators, on both sides of the Pacific, may create a regulatory protectionism that will harm both economies.’’

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/chinese-companies-head-for-the-exit/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Fund’s Debut in Thailand Raises Hopes

DealBook: Chinese Companies Head For the Exit

Recent News

Partners