Kuwait to be the largest investor in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China IPO
Beijing: Kuwait will be among the biggest investors in the upcoming IPO of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

State-owned Kuwait Investment Authority will buy ICBC shares worth $720 million, according to ICBC's prospectus, making it the largest single subscriber in what is expected to be the world's biggest initial public offering (IPO).

This participation marks the beginning of KIA's long-term strategic investment plan in China, which the KIA hopes will extend to many other sectors.

ICBC, China's biggest bank with assets of $890 billion, plans to sell 55.65 billion shares in a Hong Kong and Shanghai IPO.

The bank hopes to raise between $18 billion and $21 billion and to list on Oct. 27, in a flotation that could be larger than Japan's NTT Mobile Communications which raised $18.4 billion in 1998 in the world's largest-ever IPO to date.
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Pioneer files patent infringement complaint against Samsung
Tokyo: Japanese electronics goods major, Pioneer Corp, has filed a complaint against Samsung SDI and other Samsung companies in the United States over infringement of patents on plasma display panel technology. Samsung SDI said it plans to file a counter-complaint.

This marks the latest in a deluge of intellectual property suits and counter-suits between Japanese companies and their competitors in other parts of Asia.

Last month, a U.S. federal court rejected suits by both Samsung and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. saying neither had infringed the other's patents on dynamic random access memory (DRAM).
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