For anyone in doubt that China is the market the world’s investment banks are most desperate to make their own, just take a look at the roster of the groups that last month led the initial public offering of AIA.
The Hong Kong flotation of the Asian unit of AIG, the failed US insurer, was run by a record tally of 11 banks – nine of them Wall Street names. Along with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Malaysia’s CIMB, they shared a fee pool worth 1.75 per cent of the $17.8bn deal.
On the face of it, that is a vast sum of money, leaving each bank with an average $28m. Yet it is a far cry from the levels that the big banks have become used to, both in the western markets of today and in the China of a few years ago. Indeed, for the personnel hours involved in working on such a deal, it is a relatively scant reward.