KUALA LUMPUR | Thu Sep 27, 2012 6:05am EDT
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia's Tune Group, a financial services-to-discount hotel conglomerate owned by AirAsia Bhd's founders, said it plans to list its insurance arm in a move to fund the company's expansion overseas.
Tony Fernandes and Kamarudin Meranun, who in 1993 founded Asia's biggest budget carrier, plan to list Tune Insurance Malaysia in a move that comes hot on the heels of other planned initial public offerings by AirAsia.
These include listings by AirAsia's long haul arm AirAsia X and its Indonesian unit.
"Tune Insurance is definitely going to be the first candidate to go public under the Tune brand. As to when, we are looking at it but no news as of yet," Fernandes told reporters on Thursday in the Malaysian capital.
"It has a good business, it is in a fantastic part of the world, which is under insured. We are looking at acquisitions in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines," he said in reference to Southeast Asia.
It was not immediately clear how much the IPO intended to raise and where the company would list.
Tune Group has been expanding its insurance business in preparation for the listing.
In April, Tune Group bought a 77.9 percent stake for 153.13 million ringgit ($49.69 million) in Oriental Capital Assurance Bhd, in a move to beef up its financial services division and allow it to underwrite its insurance businesses.
Tune Group now owns some 83 percent in Tune Insurance, according to its chief executive officer Peter Miller. It could not be immediately ascertained who owned the remaining stake. ($1 = 3.0820 Malaysian ringgits)
(Reporting by Yantoultra Ngui and Anuradha Raghu; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
