Managing The Dragon

Just as the U.S. capital markets did in the 1980s, China’s capital markets are developing, providing Chinese companies with an increasingly wider variety of financing options. As capital becomes more accessible to every company in China, not just those that are owned by the state, the country’s transition to a domestically-driven economy where private companies [...]

Every once in a while, you see a statistic, or read an article that takes you completely by surprise, causing you to scratch your head and ask yourself: “When and how did that happen?” That was my reaction earlier this week when I read “IPOs, the Recovery: Starring China” in The Wall Street Journal. The [...]

AgBank’s $19.3 billion IPO may or may not go down as the largest initial public offering in history. That distinction currently belongs to Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), which raised $21.9 billion in its 2006 market debut. Largest IPO on record or not, the AgBank offering stirred up quite a bit of interest [...]

There are many reasons not to buy the newly-issued shares of the Agricultural Bank of China: China’s economy is slowing; the country’s property market remains in bubble territory; China’s stock market, one of the worst performing in 2010, is down 25 percent this year; AgBank’s vast network of 24,000 branches staffed by 440,000 employees is [...]

ExxonMobil never had a chance! Once PetroChina decided to list its shares on the red-hot Shanghai Stock Exchange, ExxonMobil’s days as the most valuable company in the world, with only a $40 billion valuation lead over second-ranked PetroChina, were numbered. When PetroChina’s shares opened in Shanghai on Monday, November 5, they immediately tripled in value [...]