MOSCOW â€" VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, announced on Monday that it had found buyers for all the shares it intended to place in a $3.3 billion secondary stock offering.
The quick deal showed that investor interest was still running high in the Russian banking sector. The country is the world’s biggest oil producer, and though the economy has slowed this year, trickle-down wealth from commodity sales still makes Russian banking stocks alluring.
Sberbank, the state retail bank and the largest bank in Russia, is the most common choice for investors. VTB, also majority owned by the state, is a distant second as measured by the volume of loans it provides.
VTB shares have also plummeted since their initial public offering in 2007, just before the financial crisis. During the crisis, the bank required the largest bailout in Russian history.
The sale Monday, however, suggested the price may have fallen far enough to make the bank’s shares attractive, given the overall prospects for the banking market in Russia.
“It shows that everything has a price,†said Bob Kommers, a banking analyst at Deutsche Bank in Moscow. “They found a price they could sell it to the market.â€
The sovereign wealth funds of Norway, Qatar and Azerbaijan were among the investors that agreed to buy shares even before the placement came onto the market. The other investors were not disclosed.
VTB is issuing the shares to raise capital and has pledged to use the money to invest in expanding its domestic business.
The bank issued the new stock with an option for the existing shareholders, including the Russian state, to buy them at a discount of about 10 percent to their market price. In the deal announced Monday, the Russian government sold its options, proportional to its overall stake in the bank of 75 percent, to the sovereign wealth funds and other investors.
The investor group also announced a bid for the remaining options held by minority shareholders before the deal closes on May 17, meaning it is willing to buy the entire issue of new stock.
The new shares will trade on Russia’s Micex stock exchange this year. That is in keeping with President Vladimir V. Putin’s template for privatizing stakes in state-owned companies. A fierce critic of the 1990s privatizations in rigged auctions, Mr. Putin has said the government would earn more in share sales on public stock exchanges.
But he has said that state companies should float on Russia’s own Micex exchange, rather than in London or New York, to support the domestic financial industry.
Investors had shied away from VTB because its earnings often seemed to rely on one-time profits, like gains from foreign exchange rate movements or trading windfalls, and not from core banking business, Mr. Kommers, the banking analyst, said. VTB issues 17 percent of the loans in Russia compared with 33 percent for Sberbank.
With news that sovereign wealth funds, which tend to hold stock for long periods, were buying the new issue, VTB shares rose 3.8 percent on Monday.
