Thai seeks more deals in China

THAI billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, who bought a $9.4bn stake in Ping An Insurance from HSBC Holdings in February, is seeking more acquisitions to tap growth in China.

THAI billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, who bought a $9.4bn stake in Ping An Insurance from HSBC Holdings in February, said on Saturday he was seeking more acquisitions to tap growth in China.

The Chinese market was a “very good expansion opportunity for us, and we will continue looking to buy stakes and make acquisitions”, Mr Dhanin, chairman of Charoen Pokphand Group, said at the Boao Forum for Asia in the southern Chinese province of Hainan. “I am very optimistic about China’s growth,” he said, adding that the company is open to investing in many sectors.

The shares in Ping An give Mr Dhanin’s Charoen Pokphand, which includes businesses ranging from agriculture to retail and telecoms, a stake in China’s second-largest insurer and an inroad to the financialservices market in the world’s second-biggest economy. Mr Dhanin, speaking on a panel at the forum, said ethnic Chinese businesspeople from outside the nation should change their investment models for China to one that puts more emphasis on mergers and acquisitions.

“We are interested in any sector with good growth potential,” he told reporters. Mr Dhanin, whose father and uncle left China’s Guangdong province in 1921 to start a seed shop in Thailand, spent more than four decades building the family business into Thailand’s biggest agricultural company and conglomerate. His net worth was estimated at $6.9bn as of yesterday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index.

When asked about a Financial Times report that UBS had provided a $5.5bn loan to fund the Thai company’s purchase of the Ping An stake from HSBC, Mr Dhanin said the funds to buy the shares came from the group itself and declined to elaborate. Charoen Pokphand hopes to co-operate with Ping An in agribusinesses, he said. Bloomberg