CHINA Everbright Bank Co. has succeeded in its third attempt at an initial public offering (IPO) after raising US$3 billion in Hong Kong to become Hong Kong’s biggest IPO this year.

    Late Friday, Everbright Bank decided to allocate more shares after the deal had closed, raising the size of the IPO from its base size of US$2.6 billion when the company met with its bankers to price the share sale.

    But the near middle-end pricing by the bank, which is in an industry facing growing bad debt, stood in contrast to the heady investor response to the recent US$2.5 billion flotation of bad debt acquirer China Cinda Asset Management Co., until now the city’s top deal.

    Everbright Bank, China’s 11th-largest bank by assets, said Friday that it priced the share sale at HK$3.98 each, near the middle of a range of HK$3.83 to HK$4.27. The bank has exercised an upsize option to sell an additional 762 million shares on top of the base size of 5.08 billion shares, bringing the fund raising size to HK$23.25 billion (US$3 billion), a source said Saturday.

    The bank, which already has a Shanghai listing, had said in its IPO filing that funds raised would go toward raising its capital to meet stricter regulatory requirements.

    Demand for Everbright Bank’s IPO wasn’t immediately available, but even before the share sale started, 58 percent of the IPO, or about US$1.74 billion worth of shares, had already been sold to 19 cornerstone investors, including Canadian insurer Sun Life Financial Inc. and U.S. insurer Prudential Financial Inc. (SD-Agencies)