OREANDA-NEWS. January 08, 2016. With the witness of Chinese President Xi Jinping and President of South Africa Jacob Zuma, Yi Huiman, President of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), and Sim Tshabalala, Co-CEO of Standard Bank Group, signed a ZAR 10 Billion Bond-issuing Cooperation Agreement. With this bond issuance, ICBC will become the first Asian institution issuing Rand-denominated Eurobonds.

According to the Agreement, ICBC will entrust Standard Bank to raise funds of ZAR10 billion by issuing Rand-denominated Eurobonds, to support the industrialization process and infrastructure construction of South Africa. As President of ICBC Yi Huiman remarked, ICBC and Standard Bank as all-round strategic partners, are jointly devoted to promoting through financial services economic and trade development in China and African countries. The issuance of Rand-denominated Eurobonds marks that the two sides’ economic and trade cooperation has lifted financial innovation to a new level.

In recent years, ICBC has leveraged its advantages in international and comprehensive operation to support China-Africa cooperation in energy import, high-end equipment export, advantageous production capacity transfer and large-scale project contracting. The Bank has taken an active part in Africa’s initiative of “Three Networks and One Industrialization” (high-speed railway network, expressway network, regional aviation network & infrastructure industrialization), agricultural development and infrastructure construction, involving such industries as electricity, oil and gas, railway, telecommunications and other infrastructures. By the end of September 2015, ICBC has launched 44 China-Africa cooperation projects in Africa, providing nearly 20 African countries with loans of approximately USD 10 billion in total. At present, nearly 100 major projects have been reserved, with investments amounting to nearly USD 80 billion across 30 African countries.

Standard Bank Group is the largest bank in Africa in term of asset size. It has more than 1,200 branches and extends its outreach to 20 African countries. In 2008, ICBC acquired 20% equity of Standard Bank by an investment of USD5.5 billion, and became its largest shareholder, realizing the strategic cooperation between the world’s largest commercial bank and the largest commercial bank in Africa. The two influential banks have shared customers, network, information and other resources to create a unified financial platform for enhanced China-Africa cooperation, providing comprehensive, high-quality and efficient financial services for enterprises to conduct cross-border trading, investment and financing.