Hong Kong — Telecoms group China Unicom is raising $11.7bn from about a dozen investors including tech giants Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, as part of Beijing’s push for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to be revitalised with private capital. The deal represents the largest capital raising in the Asia-Pacific region since insurer AIA’s 2010 market debut, as per Thomson Reuters data. It would also be the biggest deal in recent years under Beijing’s "mixed-ownership" reforms. The Chinese government is seeking to rejuvenate state behemoths with private capital, with China Unicom among the first batch of SOEs slated for the mixed-ownership reforms, whose guidelines were issued in 2015.
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