The China Ocean Shipping Group quietly raised another IPO flag last weekend to see if the public and Beijing's corporate allies or the public would salute it.
Below Deck can't imagine they will, at least not for tow years.
The Hong-Kong-listed arm of China's biggest shipping conglomerate notified the exchange on Friday it intended to sell 1.5 billion shares to domestic investors by listing China Cosco Holdings in Shanghai.
Wisely, it did not set a date or a capital target other than to say it would earmark 7.7 billion yuan of the proceeds to pay for vessels already ordered and to buy Cosco Logistics from its parent.
Should it try to make the placement - equal to 20 per cent of its enlarged share capital - in the next six months, the heavy seas it would face would make the swells it braved 15 months ago during its scaled-down H-share listing look like ripples in a pond.
Cosco's H-share listing in June last year was propped up by strong institutional support and the injection of a 52 per cent stake in its pure port play, Cosco Pacific, which was expected to inject a modicum of earnings stability into a stock that otherwise would have been at the mercy of a notoriously cyclical shipping industry.
