(Bloomberg)
Updated: 2007-08-10 09:17

China Construction Bank Corp. hired Citic Securities Co. and two rivals as advisers on a Shanghai share sale to raise about $6.5 billion, which would make it the largest this year, people with knowledge of the offering said.

China International Capital Corp., part-owned by Morgan Stanley, and China Cinda Asset Management Corp. were also chosen to arrange the sale of nine billion shares, according to the three people, who declined to be identified because the information isn't public. The story was earlier reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Winning the mandate from China's third-largest bank would generate millions in fees for the domestic brokerages. Chinese companies have sold 150.8 billion yuan ($19.9 billion) of shares in Shanghai and Shenzhen this year as the government encourages the biggest firms to list on the domestic markets.

Beijing-based China Construction hasn't indicated how much it plans to raise, though the size of the offering equals HK$51 billion ($6.5 billion) at its current share price in Hong Kong.

The sale will probably occur in the fourth quarter, the people said, as China Construction tries to boost capital to expand its network and develop new fee-based products.

Fang Qingli, a Beijing-based spokesman for Citic Securities, and Yu Baoyue at Construction Bank, declined to comment. Tracy Hu, a spokeswoman at CICC, and Li Xuemei, a Beijing-based spokeswoman at Cinda, couldn't immediately be reached.

Citic Securities, the nation's biggest publicly traded brokerage, is China's No. 1 arranger of domestic share sales this year, working on 30.1 billion yuan of deals, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. CICC, in which Morgan Stanley owns 34 percent, is No. 2.

Cinda was set up in 1999 to take over and clean up China Construction Bank's bad debt. The Beijing-based asset management company's president, Tian Guoli, said in December it would get a full brokerage license to start underwriting share sales in China.

Construction Bank's Hong Kong-traded shares closed at HK$5.68 today, down one cent.