China's second-largest brokerage Haitong Securities Co Ltd plans to launch a 10 billion yuan ($1.60 billion) fund for mergers and acquisitions, the official Securities Times reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources.

The fund will be jointly invested and operated with the state-owned Shanghai Industrial Investment (Holdings) Co Ltd and Orient International Enterprise Ltd among several other firms.

The fund, which plans to raise 3 billion yuan in its first round of fundraising and 10 billion yuan in total, will focus on firms in industries such as manufacturing, infrastructure, medicine and energy.

This comes amid a rapid growth of China's M&A market. The size of China's domestic M&A market has reached a record $41.7 billion in 2013, up 141.6 percent from a year earlier, according to data from Chinese research centre Zero2IPO.

Haitong Securities will be the second domestic brokerage to launch an M&A fund in China, following CITIC Securities Co Ltd in October 2012.

Haitong officials were not available for comment.

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