CICC
According to Dealogic, China International Capital Corp leads the league tables when it comes to domestic M&A advisory, with a total of 74 deals done between June 2017 and May 2018. The deals, worth a combined $160 billion, give it a big lead over the next mainland rival, Citic Securities, which in the same period advised 56 deals with a collective valuation of $101 billion.
Among the names that CICC advised are Cosco, Alibaba, Ant Financial, Haier, China National Chemical, China Life Insurance and Tencent Holdings.
Chief among last year’s successes was its role in advising expressway operator China Merchants Expressway Network & Technology Holdings on its merger with Huabei Expressway, a deal that resulted in an initial public offering of the combined company on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange with a valuation that reached as high as Rmb100 billion ($14.7 billion).
CICC’s leadership is particularly proud of the bank’s role last year in helping mobile phone company China Unicom to come up with a mixed ownership plan that sold down equity previously controlled by the central government. This was achieved by selling A-shares from the unit listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and red chip shares from the unit listed on the Hong Kong Exchange.
The process, which began in 2016 and was completed last year in November, involved selling equity to a select group of investors, as well as the creation of the largest share incentive plan ever in the history of state-owned enterprises. As part of the process, CICC also worked with China Unicom to grant a total of 848 million shares of restricted stock worth Rmb3.2 billion to 8,000 employees.