Today marks a year since the FTSE 100 hit a low of below 3,500. While the index is up 60% since, sentiment is not. Other deals are being decoupled while planned timetables are being dumped in order to give as much time as possible to get investors on board. So what does JPM know? Is it a gamble at clients’ expense and is any ECM team, especially syndicate, really able to manage nine concurrent IPOs (plus ongoing rights issues and placings and open offers)?

A price range is expected between Wednesday and Friday of this week. Pricing is set for March 19. Management are out on the road in London currently and will likely be in Germany or the US when the range is set.

While one banker suggested decoupling is now fairly standard in Germany, another reasoned that in this case it was a reaction to current volatility and is intended to minimise the period in which the price range is out there.

With an entire share capital of 90m, the maximum freefloat of the base deal is 50%, and up to 57.5% if the greenshoe is exercised. However bankers expect the freefloat to be nearer 30%-40% to achieve the target proceeds. Pricing should therefore come well above the minimum of €15.50 implied by the up to 45m share deal.

Fees on the deal also appear to be quite low, coming in at around €19.25m, or 2.75%. Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley are joint global co-ordinators alongside joint bookrunners JP Morgan and UBS.

The move immediately improves the bank’s prospects of winning mandates from the UK government when it eventually starts to sell its stakes in Lloyds Banking Group and RBS, but Crompton’s global remit and further hires expected indicate that the bank’s ambitions are far greater than simply these potential quick wins.

That’s just as well, since Crompton’s background far from guarantees HSBC a role on those deals. Bankers at the firm stress how cleanly Crompton managed his exit from UKFI to avoid any conflicts – he left with no job arranged and it was some time before he began contacting firms to investigate his options. But insiders nonetheless concede that it remains to be seen whether UKFI will see mandating Crompton and HSBC as too sensitive.

Crompton is believed to have been offered various figurehead roles elsewhere that would have capitalised specifically on his UKFI experience, but the opportunity to grow a business at HSBC held much greater appeal.

He will have his work cut out, though. HSBC has attempted to build an ECM business before – no fewer than three times by some insiders’ reckoning. The most recent substantive push came when former co-head of investment banking John Studzinski hired Danny Palmer from Morgan Stanley in 2004 to run global ECM.

Palmer arrived on what was reputed to be an extraordinarily generous package, but had departed by mid-2007.

Palmer had planned to leverage HSBC’s existing huge list of corporate relationships in order to become a significant player in ECM and that will again be the intention.

And while insiders stress the firm’s significant ambitions, they also make no attempt to conceal the limits to those ambitions. HSBC does not compete in the domestic US market nor in Japan, which bankers at HSBC reckon knocks out about 55% of the wallet. Getting about 7%–8% of the share of the remaining market should put the firm in the second half of the global top 10 bookrunner rankings for ECM, they say, and that is the aim.

Leveraging corporate relationships has paid off on the debt side of the business, where lending has successfully translated into debt finance more broadly. Although last week’s full-year results from HSBC showed revenues in financing and ECM to be down 14%, that was after a record result in 2008.

But the bank did secure a top 10 spot in EMEA ECM last year thanks to a run of FIG issues – and in particular bookrunner credit for BNP Paribas’ €4.3bn rights issue (HSBC was the only bank brought in at that level, as the other bookrunner was BNP itself). Elsewhere, there was a smattering of deals in Hong Kong and China, though the bank was broadly absent from India.

In terms of relationships, the bank has a good presence in France thanks the legacy CCF business that it acquired in 2000. It is the clear international leader in the Middle East and has a larger footprint than most in Africa. Perhaps most significant is the potential in the UK, as illustrated last week by HSBC’s top line role on Prudential’s US$21bn rights issue.

Making way for Crompton when he arrives in mid-April will be current incumbent Russell Julius, who will move to the role of chairman of global ECM. Julius’ switch into the chairman role is being sold as a meaningful move. In Crompton’s pre-UKFI job running EMEA ECM for Merrill Lynch, Rupert Hume-Kendall moved to be chairman alongside him. That shift was seen as successful, with Hume-Kendall freed of managerial responsibilities and let loose to pitch once again as a senior banker.

Julius, who is also widely seen as a relationship man, is expected to do the same. He was closely involved in putting in place the new set-up and is not thought to see the loss of management responsibilities and focus on origination as anything other than positive.

With a minimum freefloat of 25% (27.5% if a greenshoe is exercised), the newly-created business, comprising four Tanzanian mines spinning out of North American miner Barrick, would have a enterprise value of £2.2bn to £2.6bn.

This range values ABG at 1.3x-1.6x NAV. Parent group Barrick is valued at 1.5x NAV, while larger peer Randgold is valued at 2x NAV and Petropavlovsk, the Russian gold miner formerly known as Peter Hambro, is valued at 1.5x.

The roadshow kicked off today in London and will remain there until the middle of next week, when it moves to North America. Bookbuilding is due to close in two weeks’ time, Friday 19 March.

JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are joint bookrunners. Citigroup is co-bookrunner, BMO Capital Markets, Canacccord Adams, RBC Capital Markets and Scotia Capital are co-leads.

“Domestic demand was strong, but foreign demand was weak. Foreign investors took a view on the industry,” said one banker. The domestic book was rumoured to be around four times covered. Around 38% of the deal went to international accounts and the remainder to domestic investors.

The offering was originally intended to comprise 210m shares, of which 130m were new shares and the remainder were to be sold by state-owned KDIC (66.3m), Hanwha E&C (4.7m), Hanwha (4.5m) and Hanwha Chemical (4.5m). One domestic source suggested that the deal size would be increased to 217m shares, a suggestion that was dismissed by foreign bankers but which ultimately turned out to be correct.

The same source also suggested that the number of new shares might be increased and the number of secondary shares decreased – giving a split of around 150m new shares and 60m secondary. Two foreign sources said this was unlikely, but at time of writing there was no indication of whether the vendors had changed the amount of secondary shares for sale.

The W4trn Samsung Life IPO will be next out of the blocks.  Market sources say the company has better name recognition for international investors.

Titles below this level are being finalised but at the second rung are Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and UBS.

Below them is a large pool that includes five banks from Asia: Standard Chartered, CCB, ICBC, UOB and DBS.

Also included is Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which means all of the bookrunners for the AIA IPO are involved apart from Goldman Sachs.

Goldman is also joint broker to Prudential with UBS. Taking a slot lower than joint global co-ordinator might have been embarrassing for Goldman but the Swiss bank has been able to swallow its pride and still serve its client.

There are some suggestions that Goldman was conflicted out of the deal, though not everyone is convinced by that.

Goldman Sachs advised AIG on the sale of AIA to the Pru, but so did Citigroup and it is involved.

Shareholders and sovereign wealth funds have been keen to come in but sub-underwriting has not yet begun.

Update: With all the papers signed the final syndicate looks like this

Joint global co-ordinators and joint books – Credit Suisse, HSBC, JP Morgan Cazenove

Joint lead manager – Banca IMI, Banco Santander, BofA Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, ING, Morgan Stanley , RBS Hoare Govett, UBS

Co-lead managers – Barclays Capital, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Mediobanca, Natixis, Nomura, Scotia Capital, Societe Generale, Standard Chartered, UniCredit, UOB

Co-managers – BBVA, BOCI, Commerzbank, Fortis, ICBC, Keffe Bruyette & Woods, Lloyds, Macquarie, RBC Capital Markets.

The governments of Singapore and Qatar are also participating through their investment funds.

For the H-share tranche, Bocom International, Citic Securities, Goldman Sachs and HSBC are the joint global coordinators. The four banks, together with BNP Paribas, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BOC International and Deutsche Bank are the underwriters.

For the A-share portion, Haitong Securities and UBS Securities are the sponsors. The two banks are also joint leads with China Securities, CICC, Credit Suisse Founder Securities and Huatai Securities.

To strengthen its capital base and consequently improve its core capital adequacy ratio, Bocom is looking to raise up to Rmb42bn through a rights issue. The lender will sell 7.35bn rights shares (3.89bn A-shares and 3.46bn H-shares) on an up to 1.5-for-10 basis. The proposed rights issue is pending regulatory and shareholder approvals.