Fosun International is to buy the 219-year-old Frankfurt-based private bank Hauck & Aufhäuser, in the first outright Chinese purchase of a German bank.
The Chinese conglomerate has made a binding offer to the shareholders of Hauck & Aufhäuser, which is privately owned, and said that if all accepted, it would end up paying €210m for the German bank.
So far, shareholders holding more than 80 per cent of Hauck & Aufhäuser’s shares have accepted, Fosun said. Hauck & Aufhäuser said that a majority of its owners had agreed to the deal and advised other shareholders to follow suit.
Wolfgang Deml, chairman of Hauck & Aufhäuser, said that Fosun would open up “new international perspectives” for the German bank. “Fosun’s global network and strong involvement in the financial sector will help us to develop our business model further and to win new customers,” he said.
Guo Guangchang, the billionaire dubbed “China’s Warren Buffett” who runs Fosun, said that buying Hauck & Aufhäuser — which made a net profit of €4.7m from assets of €3.02bn in 2014 — would give the Chinese group better access to Europe’s biggest economies.
“We believe that our resources and international network will make a valuable contributionto the further development and expansion of Hauck & Aufhäuser,” Mr Guo added.
The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, will boost Fosun’s presence in Europe’s largest economy, where it already owns a nearly 20 per cent stake in BHF Kleinwort Benson, the parent company of the merchant bank, BHF.
Fosun has also made substantial investments in financial companies in other European markets in recent years. Before this deal, along with Anbang, the insurance group, it had accounted for half of the 11 Chinese finance deals done in the region over the past 18 months.
Between them, the duo had struck five deals worth more than $2.1bn, according to data provider Dealogic. They are also vying for control of Novo Banco, the Portuguese lender created out of the ashes of Banco Espírito Santo.
A recent report by Rhodium, a Chinafocused research group, said that Chinese foreign direct investment into Europe hit $18bn last year, double the 2013 level. It said investment averaged $10bn annually over each of the past four years.
However, not all the investments have come off. The biggest financial services investment by a Chinese group in Europe to date was the $3bn spent by China Development Bank to buy a 2.6 per cent stake in Barclays in 2007. Since then, the British bank’s share price has halved.
