Pre-marketing began yesterday September 26 for the first IPO by one of China's gang of four state-owned banking giants. The prospective Hong Kong listing of China Construction Bank CCB represents a significant new milestone for the Chinese government as it opens up a financial system many experts had only fairly recently thought teetering towards collapse.
After being cleaned out of NPL's and re-capitalized, a spruced up CCB is now being propelled onto the world stage as a poster child of China's financial reform effort. It will dwarf its recent predecessor, Bank of Communications BoComm, whose $160 billion asset base is three times smaller than CCB's $472 billion...
