Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s state-owned investment company, boosted its stake in Industrial & Commercial Bank of China for the third time in a year as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. exited its seven-year-old investment.
Temasek bought 280 million shares in the world’s largest bank by market value at an average price of HK$5.50 a share, or a total of HK$1.54 billion ($249 million), according to a Hong Kong stock exchange statement yesterday. Goldman Sachs raised US$1.1 billion ($1.4 billion) by selling 1.58 billion shares in ICBC on the same day, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The purchase underscores Temasek’s interest in China’s largest state-controlled banks, leading it to accumulate $21 billion of holdings in Beijing-based ICBC, China Construction Bank Corp. and Bank of China Ltd. over the past two years. Global firms including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Corp. have meanwhile divested holdings as new capital rules make it more expensive to hold minority stakes in banks.
“Temasek has a different strategy and timetable for the investments, and it will probably hold these stakes for longer,” said Wilson Li, a Shenzhen-based analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. “Temasek is different from Goldman Sachs and other investors because it is not subject to the capital requirement which basically forced all those global banks to get rid of non-core businesses.”
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