Firms see bankers as key to listing success

The more, the better. That seems to be the motto of companies looking to launch share offerings these days, with many of them lining up dozens of underwriters, compared with the four or five investment banks that would suffice in another time.

And the fact that a plethora of new banks - especially from the mainland - are trawling the market for deals to make their mark has only helped listing candidates in beefing up the ranks of underwriters.

Recently, PICC, the leading non-life insurer on the mainland, appointed a record 17 underwriters for its potential US$3 billion initial public offering to be launched this year in Hong Kong, market sources say.

Credit Suisse, HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Beijing-based China International Capital Corp, a home-grown investment bank, are the lead managers.

An investment banker with a major Wall Street bank who has worked on Asian deals for decades said many mainland companies seeking to list in Hong Kong lacked confidence and wanted more underwriters on board in a bid to impress potential investors. The nervousness was understandable in a skittish market.

Hong Kong kept the crown as the world's biggest listing market for the past three years. But in the first 10 months of this year, new listings raised just HK$49 billion, down nearly 80 per cent from the same period last year.

Listing candidates' hunt for multiple underwriters comes at a time when mainland banks are expanding rapidly in Hong Kong. For example, Shanghai-based Haitong Securities and Beijing-based Citic Securities, the two mainland market leaders, are both running big offshore operations in Hong Kong these days.