Chinese private shipbuilder New Century Shipbuilding Co., Ltd., formerly known as the Jingjiang Shipyard, is said to conduct its IPO on the Singapore Exchange Limited (SGX) in mid May at the earliest, raising USD 700 million to USD 1.1 billion. But the company declined to make any response to the sources.

If successful, it will be the biggest IPO of a Chinese firm in Singapore.

It is reported that New Century Shipbuilding has selected UBS AG and Morgan Stanley as its main underwriters, and its road show is scheduled for the end of this month.

Citing the statistics released by the China Association of the National Shipbuilding Industry (CANSI), New Century Shipbuilding separately ranked No. 3 in China and No. 11 in the whole world last year, in terms of ship output, and its sales value exceeded CNY 17 billion.

Chinese shipbuilders have been slashing in new orders since 2009, due to the global financial crisis, so such a week demand is predicted to cast more clouds over the aforementioned company's potential IPO, said people with the direct knowledge of the matter.

As a matter of fact, New Century Shipbuilding, which is headquartered in the eastern Chinese city of Jingjiang, Jiangsu Province, has been preparing for listing for a long time, and its original plan is to float shares on the Singapore bourse in 2008.

In 2004, Yuan Kaifei completed privatization of the Jingjiang Shipyarad, a state-owned company, and became the chairman of the newborn entity, namely New Century Shipbuilding. The first step in its listing on the SGX was to spend CNY 1.2 billion creating a joint venture named Jiangsu New Times Shipbuilding Co., Ltd. together with a Singaporean counterpart in 2006.

Before long, Mr. Yuan incorporated a holding firm as the future listing entity, introducing a batch of assets from New Century Shipbuilding, New Times Shipbuilding, and Jingjiang New Century Steel Structure Manufacture Co., Ltd.

Singapore is not only one of the world's shipping hubs but also an agglomeration area of major shipowners around the globe, so the local capital market that is more familiar with shipbuilding becomes the first choice for New Century Shipbuilding.

In particular, another two Jiangsu-located shipbuilders, JES International Holdings Ltd. (SGX: EG0) and Yangzijiang Shipbuilding (Holdings) Ltd. (SGX; YAZG), have been listed on the Singapore bourse. With a total market value of USD 3.3 billion, the latter wins great favor of investors there.

Source: SinoCast