VTB Capital wins Hong Kong investment banking licence

VTB Capital, the investment business of Russia’s VTB Group, has won an investment banking licence from Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission.

This is one more step for the partially state-owned VTB banking group to build its business in Asia and ensure that it is on the ground ready to facilitate deal flow for Russian clients looking to Asia for liquidity. And, indeed, earlier this week FinanceAsia and AsianInvestor hosted the second Russia Capital Raising and Investment Summit in Hong Kong to facilitate conversations between Russian and Hong Kong corporates and investors.

“Asia is a strategic market for VTB Capital,” said Alexey Yakovitsky, the firm’s global CEO. “There is a huge potential for Russian companies interested to attract funds from local equity and debt capital markets.”

 “We look forward to continuing our ambitious strategy for expansion in Asia by building on the success of our office in Singapore,” added Atanas Bostandjiev, CEO, UK and International, VTB Capital. “We will therefore be focusing on two of the major financial centres in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Increasingly, Russian corporations are focusing on China for growth — be it selling coal to the resource-hungry nation or looking to raise money from the mainland. Indeed, VTB Capital led the way last year when it was involved with the placement for the first renminbi-denominated eurobond by a Russian issuer. And VTB Capital acted as a joint bookrunner on Russian aluminium producer Rusal’s $2.24 billion Hong Kong IPO in January last year.

VTB Capital has competition here, of course. Since opening a Hong Kong office in June last year, fellow Rusal bookrunner Renaissance Capital has grown into a sector-focused business with 26 people on the ground in the region that cover sales, sales trading, research and investment banking. It has also added an office in Beijing. In April, we reported that Renaissance Capital had appointed former Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch banker Sheldon Trainor as chairman of its Asia business.

Since its foundation in 2008, VTB Capital has taken part in more than 164 equity and debt deals, which were instrumental in attracting more than $87.8 billion worth of investments into Russia. According to Dealogic, it is the number one eurobond bookrunner and the number one equity capital markets bookrunner in Russia and the CIS region, as of the first six months of this year.

For more on VTB Capital, see an interview Rupert Walker conducted last year with Yuri Soloviev, the president and global CEO of Russian investment bank VTB Capital.