RECORDS ARE MADE to be broken, but you usually have a fair idea who is likely to break them. Had you laid bets a year ago on what would replace Malaysia’s Petronas Chemicals as southeast Asia’s largest ever IPO, you might have plumped for an Indonesian resources play, or a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund spin-off, or even another arm of Petronas. You would have made a lot of guesses before you came up with a port operator that isn’t based in southeast Asia, doesn’t have a single asset there, is owned by Hong Kong’s ultimate tycoon and has opted not to list as a company at all, but as a trust. But this is the curious case of HPH Trust, the owner of about 60% of Hong Kong’s Kwai Tsing container port, Shenzhen’s Yantian container port, and a few auxiliary assets. HPH Trust is sponsored by Hutchison Ports Holdings, by some measures the world’s top port operator; that company, in turn, is owned by Hutchison Whampoa, the conglomerate controlled by Li Ka-Shing – the tycoon’s tycoon, as central and iconic to Hong Kong as the Bank of China building. Yet this two-port trust of Pearl River assets raised $5.5
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