Top China Funeral Provider Gains 66 PCT in First Trading Day

Death care business in China seems to be booming!

Shares of Fu Shou Yuan International Group Ltd, China’s largest provider of funeral services, soared as much as 66 percent in their Hong Kong trading debut on Thursday, leading a pack of first-day trading gains in the city.

Shares in Fu Shou Yuan, in which private equity firm Carlyle Group LP and hedge fund firm Farallon Investors took a minority stake, jumped to HK$5.30 compared with an IPO price of HK$3.33, according to Hong Kong stock exchange data.

Carlyle, whose co-founder William Conway visited Fu Shou Yuan’s main cemetery in Shanghai with a group of eight executives in December 2010, agreed to buy $25 million worth of shares, giving the company a $16.5 million paper profit on its week-old investment.

San Francisco-based Farallon bought another $10 million worth of Fu Shou Yuan shares, according to the IPO prospectus.

Fu Shou Yuan’s IPO was swamped by orders from small investors with the retail portion generating demand of more than 681 times the shares on offer, a company filing showed on Wednesday. The institutional tranche of the IPO was “very significantly over-subscribed”, the filing added.

[Source: http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/12/19/hongkong-debuts-idINL3N0JY0F820131219]