HONG KONG - Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the country's largest lender by assets, set a price range of 2.56 Hong Kong dollars (33 cents) to 3.07 Hong Kong dollars (39 cents) a share for its initial public offering in Hong Kong, a person familiar with the situation told Dow Jones Newswires Sunday.

ICBC is planning the first ever dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong. If priced at the top of the range, ICBC's dually listed IPO would exceed $21 billion, with the Hong Kong-listed portion alone topping $16 billion, Dow Jones Newswires said, citing an unnamed source.

That would make it the world's largest, ahead of NTT Mobile Communications Network Inc., or NTT DoCoMo Inc., which raised $18.4 billion in 1998, according to market-data provider Dealogic Inc. PLC.

The bank is seeking to issue 13 billion A shares priced in the Chinese yuan in Shanghai and 35.39 billion H shares, stocks for a mainland Chinese-registered company listed in Hong Kong, which amounts to about 14.8 percent of its share capital.

If the green shoe of ICBC's IPO is exercised, the bank could sell up to 14.95 billion A shares and 40.7 billion H shares, which would account for 16.7 percent of its total share capital. A green shoe, or overallotment option, allows underwriters to buy up to an extra 15 percent of shares at the offering price from the issuer for a period of several weeks after an offering.

The H shares were priced between 1.96 and 2.23 times forecast 2006 book value pre-green shoe, said the person familiar with the issue.

Of its listed peers in China's Big Four state-owned banks, China Construction Bank Corp.'s IPO was priced at 1.95 times book value ahead of its October 2005 listing, while Bank of China Ltd. was priced at 2.11 times book value ahead of its June listing in Hong Kong and subsequent A share listing in Shanghai.

The ICBC IPO has secured $3.5 billion in offers already, from Hong Kong tycoons, including billionaire Li Ka-shing, and two Middle Eastern investment agencies.

Chinese banks have been rushing to raise funds to strengthen their balance sheets ahead of the full opening of the domestic banking sector to foreign institutions at the end of this year.

Beijing injected $15 billion into ICBC in April 2005 to wipe out billions of dollars of bad loans and prepare it for a listing.

CCB and Bank of China were also recapitalized ahead of their listings in Hong Kong with injections of $22.5 billion each.

Investor interest in Chinese banking shares isn't waning, analysts say.

Since listing, CCB is up 48 percent and Bank of China is up 15 percent. The recent IPO of China Merchant's Bank Ltd., China's sixth largest bank, jumped 25 percent on its first day of trading in late September.

ICBC said it would use the proceeds from its listing to supplement its capital and support business growth. At the end of June, its capital adequacy ratio was 10.74 percent and its non-performing loan ratio was 4.1 percent.

The lender said earlier it expects to post a net profit of at least 47.2 billion yuan ($5.97 billion) this year under Chinese accounting standards, after it posted a net profit of 25.14 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) in the first half.

Its first-half net profit was 25.40 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) according to international accounting standards.