Deals
Public Goes Missing From Hong Kong IPOs as State Giants Buy
- Cornerstone investors are taking a bigger proportion of deals
- Market faces test with $6 billion of IPOs planned by year-end
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Companies in Hong Kong are increasingly leaving the public out of their initial public offerings.
Bigger slices of the city’s stock sales are instead going to cornerstone investors, who commit to purchasing shares before they become more widely available. Such buyers have plowed an unprecedented $9.1 billion into large IPOs in the city this year, twice breaking records for the proportion of the offerings they secured. China Huarong Asset Management Co., the nation’s biggest bad-loan manager, sold 70 percent of its $2.3 billion IPO to cornerstones last month, the highest ratio among billion dollar-plus Hong Kong deals in the past decade.