IN DECEMBER 2006, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s largest lender, acquired a 90% interest in Bank Halim, a small Indonesian lender. The deal hit the headlines, not because of its size – the consideration of $56 million is not even a rounding error on a balance sheet of more than $1.1 trillion – but simply because it happened at all. Chinese banks are entering the market for overseas acquisitions and they have immense firepower.
That firepower was demonstrated in a more meaningful way in August when state-owned China Development Bank announced a deal to invest up to $11.6
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