China's biggest lender, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has raised over 15 billion euros in the world's biggest initial public offering of shares. Overwhelming demand from institutional and private investors meant the shares were priced at the top end of expectations.

At 15.3 billion euros, ICBC beat the previous record for IPOs of 14.7 billion euros set by Japanese mobile phone company NTT DoCoMo in 1998. Italian utility Enel, Deutsche Telekom and Bank of China are the other biggest. The sale of 14.8% of the bank's shares was the first simultaneous offering in Hong Kong and Shanghai. In Hong Kong more than one million people applied for shares.

Mainland Chinese banks have a reputation for bad debts, but the Beijing government has been trying to address the problem and investors are keen to buy shares so they can tap into the world's fastest-growing major economy. The bank has 18,000 branches and a customer base bigger than the population of Russia.