Lead manager Goldman Sachs was able to successfully price a 30.4 million share offering for Standard Chartered last Friday, balancing the slim discount permitted under UK guidelines with a 15% run up in the bank's share price since the onset of pre-marketing two weeks earlier. More importantly for Standard Chartered, completion of the deal sees the bank achieve a long cherished and once postponed goal of listing in Hong Kong and bringing Asian institutional investors to its stock for the first time.
Its experience also runs contrary to most recent equity deals, where lead managers have had to contend with steeply declining share prices and correspondingly fractious issuers. In this instance, the challenge for the...
