Here are seven reasons why investing in ICICI Bank is better than investing in Blackstone.
1. ICICI Bank is managing assets of $79 billion, compared to Blackstone managing assets of about $88 billion. The major difference in these two asset bases is that ICICI has much larger customer base in the Indian middle class, whereas Blackstone is managing money for large institutions and rich people.
2. ICICI is biggest Indian bank by market cap (about $22 billion) and the second largest Indian bank in terms of assets. Even with this market cap, it is only about 1/11th that of Citibank and still far behind China construction bank, which has a market cap of more than $220 billion. This provides large upside and growth potential for ICICI. Compared to this, Blackstone's market cap (about $32 billion) is 1/3rd of its largest competitor, Goldman Sachs
3. ICICI has a very large presence in India's biggest metros and still offers tremendous growth opportunity in second tier cities.
4. Indian bank industry will be going through M&A activity and being the largest bank would be a tremendous opportunity for ICICI bank to get even bigger.
5. ICICI bank has wide variety of products ranging from retail banking to insurance to brokerage. Its stake inan insurance company alone would be billions of dollars.
6. Investing in ICICI bank is like investing in India's growth story since banks are best barometer ofa country's economy
7. Indian billionares like Azim Premji, Ambani and Bajaj are investing about $250 million each in this issue. In addition, large foreign investors like Temesek and Warburg Pincus are investing large amounts in this issue. All of these smart investors cannot be wrong at same time
Via SeekingAlpha