The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) will start reviewing initial public offering (IPO) applications for the growth enterprise market (GEM) before October 1, a CSRC official said Friday.

The CSRC has dealt with applications from 149 companies seeking to list on the GEM market since it started to receive applications on July 26, said the official in charge of the GEM development, who didn't give his name.

Around 40 of them are ready for the pre-review meeting, he said. If the companies pass the pre-review meeting, they will be proposed for the formal IPO reviewing which is expected in late September, the official added. The CSRC set up an IPO review committee in August.

According to the CSRC, the 149 companies are expected to raise a combined 33.6 billion yuan (4.94 billion U.S. dollars). Apart from the largest sum of 825 million yuan and the smallest sum of 85 million yuan, the remaining 147 companies will raise 227 million yuan on average each, which is merely 62 percent of the raised amount in IPO on the small and medium-sized enterprise market.

Statistics from the CSRC showed that 68 percent of the 149 companies belong to the innovative industries of electronic information, new materials, biomedicine and modern services. About 15 percent of the companies are from manufacturing industry.

A total of 98 of the 149 companies are in Beijing, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta regions. About 8 percent of the 149 companies are foreign-invested and 9 percent are state-owned while most are private, according to the CSRC.

(Xinhua News Agency September 12, 2009)