China strengthened its hand on the international financial stage yesterday when Ping An, its second-largest insurer, paid €1.8 billion (£1.3 billion) to become the largest shareholder in Fortis, the Belgo-Dutch group that has become one of Europe’s most powerful players in financial services.

The acquisition by Ping An, a £46 billion insurer listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong, gave it a 4.18 per cent stake in Fortis. Louis Cheung, chairman of the state-backed insurer, will join the board as a nonexecutive director.

Ping An’s move on Fortis follows high-profile investments by Chinese corporations in financial groups as diverse as Barclays, Britain’s third-largest banking group, and Blackstone, the quoted American private equity giant. It comes just two days after Citigroup, the world’s largest bank, received a $7.5 billion (£3.6 billion) cash injection from Abu Dhabi.

The acquisition, which paves the way for cross-selling agreements, pushed shares in the company more than 3.5 per cent higher, to €18.80.

Shares in Fortis, Belgium’s biggest financial services group, have tumbled by a third since the beginning of the year amid worries about its exposure to the credit markets and hefty payouts on insurance losses.

Ping An, based in the southern city of Shenzhen, is half as large again as Fortis, which is listed on Euronext in Brussels and Amsterdam and has a market value of about £34 billion. Ping An is larger than any London-listed bank except the sprawling international financial services giant HSBC, which itself owns 16.8 per cent of the Chinese insurer.

Fortis was most recently part of a consortium that emerged victorious from a six-month, €71 billion bid battle to buy the Dutch-based banking and insurance group ABN Amro.

Ping An is booming in its home market, and recently reported a fourfold increase in third-quarter profits to 3.6 billion yuan (£236 million). But like many of its counterparts, it is keen to expand internationally, particularly through the acquisition of strategic stakes in European or American companies.

Peter Ma, chairman of Ping An, said: “The deal will realise valuable benefits because of Fortis’s and Ping An’s shared business model of an integrated banking and insurance platform.”

Ping An, which is locked into the investment for three years, has agreed not to take its stake above 4.99 per cent without clearing it first with Fortis, and has pledged not to launch a full takeover.

The acquisition is the latest in a growing line of strategic deals by Chinese companies. In July, China Development Bank paid £1.6 billion for a 3.1 per cent stake in Barclays. At the same time, the UK bank received a $2 billion cash boost from Temasek, the Singapore investment group, to help to fund its ultimately fruitless bid for ABN.

Last month, ICBC paid $5.6 billion for a 20 per cent stake in Standard Bank of South Africa, and Citic paid $1 billion to secure a stake of about 6 per cent in Bear Stearns, the embattled Wall Street securities house. The China Investment Corporation agreed in May to buy a stake of just under 10 per cent in Blackstone, just ahead of the private equity firm’s listing in the US.

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