Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group on Thursday became the first Japanese bank to buy into a Chinese lender, picking up a stake worth about $180 million in Bank of China as it made its market debut.
　　
　　MUFG, the world’s biggest bank by assets, was one of 12 investors chosen to take stakes of up to about 0.19 percent in China’s second-biggest bank, which listed its shares in Hong Kong on Thursday.
　　
　　Royal Bank of Scotland and several others earlier secured larger shares in the state-controlled bank.
　　
　　Although the investment is too small to give MUFG any sway over Bank of China’s operations, it highlights the Japanese giant’s growing appetite for overseas expansion following its creation in a mega-merger last October.
　　
　　MUFG hopes that new opportunities created by the investment will help it increase the number of branches it runs in China from the current five, an MUFG source said.
　　
　　One plan under consideration is to raise the status of five smaller representative offices in the country to that of full-fledged branches.
　　
　　"Japanese banks have been slow to invest in China, so the key thing for MUFG was just to buy itself a ticket," said a Tokyo-based analyst, who asked not to be named because his firm is one of many here with links to the deal.
　　
　　One concrete advantage for MUFG is that the investment will make it easier to obtain permission from Chinese authorities to lend funds in yuan, he added.
　　
　　"For clients such as Japanese firms doing business locally, that’s vital."
　　
　　Bank of China’s $9.7 billion initial public offering was the world’s largest in six years.
　　
　　Its shares rose a more-than-expected 15 percent in their debut, defying a recent slide in global financial markets.
　　
　　U.S. and European banks have taken stakes in two other Chinese lenders that have listed their shares, China Construction Bank and Bank of Communications .
　　
　　But Japanese banks, still shoring up their finances after a decade-long bad-debt crisis, have stayed on the sidelines until now.
　　
　　One obstacle has been a mountain of taxpayer money sitting on Japanese banks’ books. Tokyo injected more than 10 trillion yen ($88.8 billion) into lenders in bail-outs in the late 1990s, money they must return before earmarking capital to expand.
　　
　　MUFG said last week it would repay the last of its taxpayer funds this month.
　　
　　Japan’s newly healthy banks hope to reclaim the global status they enjoyed until the mid-1990s.
　　
　　In the last year, MUFG and rivals Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Mizuho Financial Group have opened offices in Eastern Europe, China and other emerging markets.
　　
　　Major Japanese banks held 84 trillion yen ($746 billion) in outstanding loans at overseas branches in 1997. That total shrank to 13.5 trillion yen by early 2004, according to the Bank of Japan, but has being growing steadily since.
　　
　　Japanese banks mostly serve the overseas operations of Japanese firms, but they are expanding loans to local companies as well, and hope eventually to compete with global giants such as Citigroup and HSBC .
　　
　　MUFG earned 1.18 billion yen ($10.5 million) in net profit in the business year ended in March, the most ever for a Japanese bank, helped by a dramatic fall in problem loans.