Foreign banks left out of initial public offerings in China

Foreign banks’ involvement in initial public offerings in mainland China has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, in a sign of the difficulties they face retaining a foothold in the country’s closed-off financial system.

So far this year, foreign banks have been involved in just $297mn worth of new listings, or 1.2 per cent of the total. The proportion is lower than in any full year since Dealogic began collecting the data in 2009, when the banks were involved in about half of total listings by value. Last year’s 3.1 per cent represented the third-worst year on record.

Not a single US bank has been involved in the 109 IPOs in China’s vast stock market in 2023, where a total of $26bn has been raised to date in deals that frequently attract massive demand from domestic investors. Only Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank have acted as bookrunners this year.

While the operations of foreign banks are dwarfed by mainland competitors, the data reflects their struggle to hold on to a meaningful presence in a fast-evolving but insulated market with different regulatory and due diligence requirements. Severe Covid-19 restrictions over the past three years limited access to the country, adding to the distance between mainland subsidiaries and their overseas headquarters.

In 2019, foreign banks were involved in about a fifth of all funds raised in Shanghai and Shenzhen, home to two of the country’s biggest bourses, but that proportion has fallen every year since.

“I’m amazed that there’s [billions of dollars’ worth] of issuance for IPOs in Shanghai every week, and the banks underwriting them are almost exclusively domestic,” said a senior executive at a global bank in Asia, who did not wish to be named.

“The [global] banks have onshore ventures, yet we seem to be involved in [few] of the domestic deals. Something needs to happen — the big banks either need to be involved in these A-share [mainland Chinese listing] deals, or we should leave the business and stop having resources allocated to it.”

The weakness also comes amid worsening geopolitical tensions between the US and China that have cast a chill over foreign businesses on the mainland and led to complaints of communication breakdowns.

“This is the environment that Xi Jinping has created,” said Fraser Howie, an independent analyst and expert on Chinese finance who pointed to a “post-Covid, cold war two world”.

“It’s not that the rules say [no foreign banks] or that there’s a genuine risk there. It’s that it might just be easier for an issuer not to have a foreign bank and only deal with Chinese bookrunners.”

Foreign banks require multiple licences to operate across different sectors in China. Many of those with securities businesses struggled to make a profit last year, according to an Financial Times analysis of their data.

Another factor is concern about due diligence on the part of foreign institutions. Several executives at global banks said they were often hesitant to work on Chinese listings because it was difficult to carry out the level of due diligence that their internal processes required.

“I operate on the basis of what would we have to do if it was a US offering, and that’s my standard,” said a top executive at one global bank’s Asian investment banking arm, who wished to remain anonymous. “I need a list of your top 50 clients and I want to make independent due diligence calls to them. [In China] I’m not sure they’re going to go through the same independent due diligence that a western bank would.”

In addition, Chinese listings tend to rely less on institutional investors and more on retail investors than those in the US, meaning global banks’ traditional models are ill-suited to the mainland market, the banker said.

“A lot gets sold to retail, so you really need to have a retail brokerage platform to sell these deals,” he said. “The business model that the western banks run, where you sell [shares] to the same 100 or so investors every time, doesn’t work.”