Axa Wealth Management HK Ltd, which offers savings and investment-linked insurance products, is expected to be valued at about $500m (£377.5m, €418m). The bidders are chiefly from China Reuters reports.
The business comes with valuable access to Hong Kong’s lucrative insurance sector, without the long wait for a license.
Axa is in the midst of a five-year plan launched last year to bolster its earnings per share growth by three percentage points to 7% a year.
New chief executive Thomas Buberl, is seeking to lift the insurer’s profits through cost cuts and by targeting higher margin products.
It sold the Isle of Man based Axa Life Europe in April 2016 to specialist M&A firm Life Company Consolidation Group (LCCG), which has since rebranded it as Utmost Wealth Solutions.
In May last year, the company sold Axa Wealth’s non-platform pensions and investments business along with SunLife, its direct protection business, to Phoenix for £375m ($550m, €492m) in cash.
Last month Phoenix, Britain’s largest closed life fund consolidator, said as a result it had doubled operating profit during the first six months of 2017 in part because of the cash earned from that Axa acquisition which it was able to generate more rapidly than expected.
