CICC
China International Capital Corp leads Dealogic’s league tables when it comes to cross-border M&A advisory among Chinese banks, completing a total of 11 deals with a combined value of $18.5 billion.
CICC is widely known in the industry as China’s most international investment bank.
Founded in 1995 as a joint initiative by China Construction Bank and Morgan Stanley, it is also China’s oldest joint-venture investment bank and the first in China to emulate the practices of global investment banks. In the last year in particular, CICC advised on a number of landmark offshore deals.
The deal that stood out in particular last year was when its bankers acted as joint financial advisers for Yanzhou Coal Mining on its acquisition in Australia. Yancoal Australia, a subsidiary of the Chinese coal giant, successfully completed its $2.5 billion equity issuance on the ASX to fund its acquisition of Coal & Allied from Rio Tinto in September last year. The issuance was the first ever ASX market equity-raising conducted by a Chinese investment bank – an exercise that required CICC to meet all Australian regulatory and compliance procedures.
Alongside this main transaction, CICC helped Yancoal to sell 49% of one of Coal & Allied’s key mining assets, Hunter Valley Operations, also known as HVO, to Glencore. Glencore further subscribed to $300 million in Yancoal’s equity issuance and became a strategic investor of Yancoal.
The deal was the largest in size among Chinese companies’ acquisitions in Australia since 2014 and the second-largest in size in Australia in 2017.