By Xie Fang
The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) disclosed on its website last Friday that it would review the IPO application submitted by the People's Insurance Company of China (PICC) on Tuesday, which would mark a decisive moment for the company's IPO effort.
Should the company pass the review, it will become the fifth Chinese insurance company to go public in both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.
As the oldest insurance company in China, whose history can be dated back to 1949, the PICC is now among the country's five largest insurance titans with an asset value exceeding RMB 1 trillion.
The company took its property insurance subsidiary public in the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX) in 2003. The company itself got listed in the HKEX in 2012, becoming the biggest IPO case of the year in the HKEX.
The company initiated its A-share listing effort last May and has been steadily advancing the process since then. During the company's 2017 annual results announcement held on March 26, Sheng Hetai, vice president of the PICC, said that the progress on the company's A-share listing would depend on the CSRC's review procedure as well as the time window of the A-share market.
The company's prospectus shows that it plans to issue 4.599 billion shares for a total of RMB 10 billion, which will rank 8th by the volume of shares to be issued in the history of the A-share market.
It is worth noting that there has been no insurance company going public in the A-share market in more than six years since the listing of the New China Life Insurance Co. in 2011.
