Agricultural Bank to raise $12bn over three years

Agricultural Bank of China said it will sell as much as 80bn yuan ($12bn) of Tier-2 securities over three years, joining the latest wave of fundraising by Chinese lenders.
The bank needs to strengthen its capital buffers, president Zhao Huan told reporters in Beijing yesterday, adding that the lender aims to maintain a stable dividend payout. It currently has no plan to raise equity, Zhao said.
The announcement came after the bank eked out a 0.5% increase in second-quarter profit from a year earlier, and a mid-sized Chinese lender, China Citic Bank Corp, on Thursday announced plans to raise as much as 40bn yuan by selling convertible bonds.
Fundraising also includes a planned $8bn initial public offering in Hong Kong by Postal Savings Bank of China Co. Besides the convertible bonds, Citic Bank has previously disclosed plans to sell as much as 35bn yuan of preferred shares, while Industrial Bank Co may raise up to 26bn yuan in a private stock placement. Chinese lenders are grappling with their weakest profit growth in more than a decade and a pileup of bad debt, after flooding the financial system with cheap credit for years to prop up economic growth.
Agricultural Bank’s capital-adequacy ratio fell to 12.81% in June from 13.11% three months earlier. China’s banking regulator requires systemically important banks to have a minimum ratio of 11.5% by the end of 2018, with the ability to add an additional 2.5 percentage point counter-cyclical buffer if needed. Agricultural Bank was added to a global list of systemically important lenders in 2014, making it subject to more stringent capital requirements. Citic Bank plans to sell bonds convertible into yuan-denominated shares. The money will fund growth and, after conversion, will replenish the bank’s core Tier-1 capital.