Alcoa, the world’s top aluminum maker, is selling its entire stake in Aluminum Corp of China for up to $2 billion, reaping a potential profit on its investment of as much as $1.9 billion. Alcoa will sell 700 million shares, with an option to increase the number to 884.2 million shares, at between HK$17.26 and HK$18.27 per share. That’s a discount of between 10.4 percent and 15.4 percent to the stock’s closing price of HK$20.40 on Wednesday. Goldman Sachs is handling the deal. (Alcoa’s chairman and CEO Alain Belda pictured left)
    
** Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway shed another chunk of its stake in top Chinese oil producer PetroChina, selling about 92.66 million shares in late August for $136 million. The sale cuts Berkshire’s holding of PetroChina’s freely tradable shares to 9.72 percent, or 2.05 billion shares, from 10.16 percent. PetroChina’s share price has risen about 35 percent over the past year on high oil prices and vigorous Chinese demand, although domestic rivals CNOOC and Sinopec have seen stock price rises of 56.5 and 76.5 percent over the same period.
    
** Russia’s cartel office rejected a bid from German industrial conglomerate Siemens to buy a controlling stake in Russian turbine maker Power Machines. Siemens owns 25 percent of the turbine maker and had said it was not aiming for a majority stake. Its past attempts to take control of Power Machines were blocked by Russian authorities citing national security reasons. Russia’s Interros, the investment vehicle of billionaires Vladimir Potanin and Mikhail Prokhorov, earlier said it signed a deal to sell its 30.4 percent stake in Power Machines to a Russian strategic investor, but did not name the buyer.
    
** Shares in ports-to-telecoms conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa surged as much as 8 percent and its bond spreads tightened after a report said it planned to sell its Italian 3G mobile operating arm, 3 Italia. The company is understood to have sent out an information memorandum in the hope of unearthing potential bidders for the Italian division, the largest of its third-generation businesses, the Times of London said in an online report.
    
** Top South Korean retail bank Kookmin reaffirmed its intention to buy the sixth-biggest local lender, Korea Exchange Bank, challenging a bid from UK-based HSBC, which said last week it had agreed to buy 51 percent of KEB from U.S. private equity firm Lone Star for $6.3 billion. The agreement came almost a year after Lone Star scrapped a $7.3 billion deal to sell the lender to Kookmin because of legal disputes in South Korea on whether Lone Star had acted illegally in the way it bought KEB in 2003.  will sell 700 million shares, with an option to increase the number to 884.2 million shares, at between HK$17.26 and HK$18.27 per share. That’s a discount of between 10.4 percent and 15.4 percent to the stock’s closing price of HK$20.40 on Wednesday. Goldman Sachs is handling the deal. 
   
Picture: Reuters file