Bank of Beijing approved to invest in foreign assets
SHANGHAI: Bank of Beijing, which is 19.9 percent owned by the Dutch bank ING, has won official approval to invest $300 million of client money abroad under the Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor program, The Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday.
The Chinese bank is the first city commercial bank in mainland China to win the rights to invest in overseas capital markets, the newspaper said, quoting an unidentified source close to Bank of Beijing. The program, which began last year, gives domestic investors access to stock and bond markets outside mainland China for the first time.
Including the $300 million quota allocated to Bank of Beijing, China has granted a total quota of $13.2 billion to mainland commercial banks, it said.
Recent domestic news media reports have cited lukewarm response from investors to some products linked to the program, partly because of expectations of further appreciation in the yuan against the dollar.
The plan was also aimed at relieving some of the upward pressure on the yuan.
Bank of Beijing, which reported to be seeking a Hong Kong listing, had total assets of 272.2 billion yuan, or $35 billion, at the end of last year with capital adequacy ratio of 12.87 percent, Shanghai Securities News said.
AXA expands in China
A venture of AXA Asia Pacific has received regulatory approval to open a life insurance branch in Foshan, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, Bloomberg News reported from Sydney.
Axa-Minmetals Assurance a venture between AXA Asia Pacific, its parent, AXA, and China Minmetals was given the license by the China Insurance Regulatory Commission.
The license “supports our further expansion into the China market,” AXA Asia Pacific chief executive, Andrew Penn, said in a statement Wednesday.
AXA Asia Pacific, like its rivals New York Life Insurance and Manulife Financial of Canada, is expanding in China to tap a market where life insurance premiums rose 11 percent to 359.3 billion yuan in 2006. The total assets of insurance companies in China rose by almost a third to 1.97 trillion yuan last year, the Chinese insurance regulator said earlier this month.
Axa-Minmetals Assurance has branches in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
