First two Chinese city banks to launch domestic IPOs

Two Chinese city banks will soon become the first in a batch of smaller lenders to list on the domestic stock markets, state media said Wednesday. Bank of Nanjing and Bank of Ningbo, which released on Wednesday their prospectuses for selling shares on local bourses, will be the first two small commercial city banks in China to go public, the Xinhua news agency reported.
Bank of Nanjing, 19.2 percent owned by BNP Paribas and based in east China's Jiangsu Province, is expected to sell up to 700 million yuan-denominated A shares, or 36.7 percent of its total, on the Shanghai stock exchange.
The institutional subscription is scheduled for July 11 and 12 and the retail subscription is set for July 12, the report said. The bank, with 58 branches in Jiangsu, reported gross assets of 57.9 billion yuan (7.6 billion dollars) and net profits of 595 million yuan last year, as well as a non-performing loan ratio of 2.47 percent, the report said.
Bank of Ningbo, which owns 68 branches across the affluent Zhejiang province in east China, will sell up to 450 million shares, or 18 percent of its total capitalisation, on the Shenzhen stock exchange.
It has the same subscription timetable as the Bank of Nanjing. Ningbo had 56.6 billion yuan in total assets and a non-performing loan ratio of 0.33 percent in 2006, Xinhua said, compared with the average NPL ratio of 7.1 percent for all of China's banks at the end of last year. Apart from Bank of Nanjing and Bank of Ningbo, seven other lenders out of the 114 city commercial banks across the country have expressed their intention to go public, according to earlier reports.