March 25 (Bloomberg) -- Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world’s largest lender by market value, said Goldman Sachs Group Inc. agreed to extend the lockup-period for most of the shares the U.S. firm holds by one more year.

Goldman committed to hold 80 percent of its almost 16.5 billion shares in ICBC until April 2010 under a new agreement, the Beijing-based company said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange. The earlier agreement allowed Goldman to sell 50 percent of its holdings on April 28, 2009, and the remaining on Oct. 20.

Speculation that Goldman would trim its holding, valued at $7.6 billion, has helped push ICBC shares 12 percent lower in Hong Kong this year. The stock gained 1.1 percent to close at HK$3.58 today. Goldman is in talks to repay the $10 billion it received from the U.S.’s Troubled Asset Relief Program by mid-April, a person familiar with the matter has said.

Goldman doesn’t “need to sell this stake to repay TARP money,” said Amit Rajpal, a Hong Kong-based asset manager at Marshall Wace LLP. “They’re already carrying that at market value. So if they sell it today, they don’t actually book an incremental profit and therefore won’t help them boost capital in order to repay TARP.”

ICBC today posted the slowest profit growth in at least a year after boosting bad-loan provisions and writing down mortgage investments.

Fourth-quarter net income rose 0.5 percent to 18.11 billion yuan ($2.65 billion), based on figures released by the Beijing- based bank today. Profit was lower than the 18.84 billion yuan average estimate among 25 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

To contact the reporter for this story: Jun Luo in Shanghai at jluo6@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 25, 2009 09:10 EDT