(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2007-09-26 12:41

Shares in China Construction Bank closed at 8.53 yuan (US$1.41) on Tuesday, up 32.25 percent from its initial public offering (IPO) on the first day of trading on the Shanghai bourse.

Although such a share price increase would be considered large in many markets, it is well below the first-day jump enjoyed by several other Chinese companies in recent months, Financial Times said in a report.

Share prices of Bank of Communications, Bank of Ningbo and COCSO all saw over 100 percent increase on their first day of trading.

As the country's second largest commercial bank, CCB raised 58.05 billion yuan (US$7.73 billion) in its Shanghai IPO. The IPO was the biggest ever domestic listing, exceeding the 46.6 billion yuan raised by the ICBC in October last year.

The bank's debut attracted 2.26 trillion yuan in subscriptions for its yuan-denominated A-share sale, exceeding the 1.9 trillion yuan on the IPO of the Bank of Beijing, the country's largest city commercial bank, last week.

China's securities regulator has recently approved several large share offerings by State-owned companies, partly in an attempt to slow down a stock market that has been on a remarkable two-year run, with share prices rising more than fivefold, according to the report.

Officials are worried that the market could develop into a large bubble - with some foreign analysts saying one already exists, the report said.

The record for the largest IPO may shortly be broken after China Shenhua Energy Co, the nation's largest coal producer, was approved to raise as much as 66.6 billion yuan in the Shanghai bourse.

PetroChina has also won regulatory approval on Monday to float 4 billion A shares in Shanghai to raise about 37.77 billion yuan.

Analysts said the more modest response to the CCB listing also reflected the fact that investors could now choose between half a dozen large banks on the Shanghai market.

However, not all analysts believe the flood of new paper will subdue share prices, according to the report.

"These IPOs will not significantly impact the liquidity in the market," Cen Wei with the research department of Pudong Development Bank in Shanghai was quoted by Financial Times as saying.

"With the large trade surplus and new investors coming into the market, liquidity could actually increase." Cen said.