ASIA-FOCUSED bank Standard Chartered unveiled a surprise £1 billion (€1.17 billion) fundraising as it beat expectations with a record mid-year pretax profit yesterday.
Chief executive Peter Sands said the share placing was “absolutely not” to build a war-chest for a big acquisition, but was to give the bank firepower to take advantage of opportunities as Asian economies recovered.
“It’s about staying ahead of the game,” Mr Sands said. “Given that we see Asia having a shorter and shallower recession than other parts of the world, our clients are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, and we want to anticipate that and support them.”
He said the bank was in talks about small acquisitions in China and India which would cost “low hundreds of millions of dollars”.
Standard Chartered is in talks to buy Royal Bank of Scotland’s assets there which could cost about $200 million, a person familiar with the matter has previously told Reuters.
The bank sold 75 million shares at £13.60 apiece, a 5.3 per cent discount to Monday’s close. The quickfire placing – the biggest in London this year – was handled by JPMorgan, Cazenove and UBS.
The shares closed down 7.5 per cent at £13.28 as the placing sucked out investor demand and outweighed its positive earnings, analysts said. Standard Chartered reported a mid-year pretax profit to June 30th of $2.84 billion, up from $2.59 billion a year ago. – (Reuters)
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