China Great Wall to form insurance JV with Nippon Life

BEIJING Oct 19 (Reuters) - China Great Wall Asset Management Corp, a state-owned firm formed to clean up banks' bad debts, said it had launched a life insurance joint venture with Nippon Life Insurance, Japan's biggest life insurer by assets.

In September, Great Wall completed the purchase of a 50 percent stake previously held by Shanghai SVA Group in a China-based company launched with Nippon Life [NPNLI.UL] in 2003, it said in a statement.

Great Wall and Nippon Life, a mutually owned insurer, were going to inject 500 million yuan ($73.25 million) each into the joint venture to increase its registered capital to 1.3 billion yuan, the statement said.

Great Wall is one of China's four asset management companies, fully owned by the Ministry of Finance, that were established in 1999 to acquire non-performing assets from state-owned banks as the latter were reformed into profit-making institutions.

Great Wall has swallowed 600 billion yuan worth of bad assets from Agricultural Bank of China [ABC.UL], Bank of China (3988.HK) (601988.SS), Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (1398.HK)(601398.SS) and China Everbright Bank over the past 10 years.

Nippon Life managed 44 trillion yen ($484 billion) of assets at the end of March this year, of which about 12 percent was in domestic shares worth 5.5 trillion yen, and it was considering cutting its shares in domestic firms by 10-20 percent, the Nikkei business daily recently reported. [ID:nT148092]. ($1=6.826 Yuan) (Reporting by Aileen Wang and Simon Rabinovitch; Editing by Ken Wills)