BEIJING, June 25 -- ICICI Bank Ltd, India's biggest finance company by market value, will raise its share sale, a record for an Indian company, to 5 billion U.S. dollars from 4.3 billion dollars, Chief Executive Officer K.V. Kamath said Sunday.

    The additional amount will come from the so-called green shoe option, where it had said it may sell a further US$644 million in stock. The company doesn't plan to expand through mergers and acquisitions and will grow organically, Kamath said in an interview with Bloomberg News in Singapore.

    "Our intention is to raise the entire amount," he said. "If you look at the Indian banking sector, it's still very small. This will provide the foundation for us to grow."

    The share sale by ICICI, which has doubled its profits in four years of at least eight percent economic growth, accounts for half the 10 billion dollars that India's banks plan to raise in the year to the end of March 2008. ICICI expects to boost loans to companies expanding overseas and in a rural economy that's home to more than 600 million of the South Asian nation's 1.1 billion people.

    India's 854 billion dollars economy, the world's fastest-growing major economy after China, grew an average 8.6 percent a year in the past four years. The government aims to raise the pace to 10 percent by 2012, allowing ICICI to lend more to India's 300 million-member middle class.

    The Mumbai-based bank split its share sale equally between Indian and overseas investors. ICICI said on Saturday that it sold the Indian shares at 940 rupees each, where demand was 11.5 times greater than the shares on offer. It sold American depositary shares at 49.25 dollars each.

    (Source: Shanghai Daily)