By Serena Saitto and Helder Marinho

March 30 (Bloomberg) -- Eike Batista, the Brazilian billionaire whose initial sale this month of OSX Brasil SA raised $3.9 billion less than sought, said he is “ready” to take holding company EBX Group Ltd. public and aims to lure $1 billion from the offer of Colombian gold mining shares.

Batista, the world’s eighth-richest man according to Forbes magazine, said the initial public offering of EBX Group will take place as soon as equity capital markets improve while the gold company IPO is planned in a year. His oil services and ship-building company OSX fell 12.5 percent in its debut last week and remains 12 percent below the IPO price after investors balked at buying shares in a company with no revenue.

Markets are a “little dry of funds,” Batista, 53, said in an interview yesterday in his office overlooking Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf Mountain. The “EBX IPO is on hold until market conditions improve,” he said. “If those conditions open next month, we are ready.” He declined to comment on OSX.

OSX is one of four Brazilian IPOs this year that have raised less than companies sought. Brazil’s benchmark Bovespa stock index is up 2 percent this year, lagging behind the 5.2 percent gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Even as the slump in Brazil’s IPOs has deepened this month, all five of the American companies to offer stock in the past two weeks sold the shares within or above their forecast range, while Financial Engines Inc. became the first this year to price above its range on March 15.

Batista’s IPOs

OSX slid 0.3 percent to 708 reais in Sao Paulo trading today, while the Bovespa index added less than 0.1 percent to 69,959.58.

Batista cut the OSX sale to $1.6 billion from as much as $5.5 billion amid waning investor demand after successfully listing four companies since 2006, including OGX Petroleo & Gas Participacoes SA two years ago, which was Brazil’s biggest at the time. Rio de Janeiro-based OSX has never reported a profit and its main assets are 3.2 million square meters of oceanfront property in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina and the guarantee of orders from Batista’s oil company, OGX Petroleo.

EBX, founded by Batista in 1980, is the holding company for his mining, transport, ship-building and energy businesses. He said he plans to raise as much as $1 billion in a year with the public offering of AUX, a gold-mining company he’s creating in Colombia. Batista said the shares will be sold in the Brazilian market. He declined to give more details on the company.

‘Give Us Time’

All the companies in his EBX group have potential growth of three to five times their current value, according to Batista.

“Give us time,” he said.

Batista has more than tripled his wealth in the past year to $27 billion, putting him in the top 10 of Forbes’s billionaires list for the first time. The son of a former chief executive officer of Rio de Janeiro-based Vale SA, the world biggest iron ore producer, he debuted on Forbes’s list in 2008 at 142nd place with $6.6 billion.

Batista said he is no longer interested in buying a stake in Vale. He said in a statement in October that he had inquired about buying an indirect stake in the company.

“When we tried to buy it, Vale was worth $90 billion,” he said. “It is now worth $150 billion. You should never fall in love with assets.”

Buying Interest

Batista said OGX had been interested in buying the Brazilian assets of Devon Energy Corp., which BP PLC bought this month for $7 billion. OGX is also interested in bidding for licenses to explore Colombia’s onshore oil blocs, he said, ruling out interest in Brazil’s pre-salt oil reserves.

Petroleo Brasileiro SA’s Tupi field, located in the pre- salt area that runs 800 kilometers (500 miles) off Brazil’s coast, is the biggest oil discovery in the Americas since Mexico’s Cantarell field in 1976. Tupi may hold as many as 8 billion barrels of oil, Petrobras has said.

Financing options may grow for companies as China considers letting more funds invest overseas, Batista said.

“It will be a very interesting new source of capital,” he said. China has been investing in EBX-controlled companies, he said.

“We hope this relationship will continue,” Batista said.

On April 16, when China President Hu Jintao visits Porto Acu, a port being built by Batista’s LLX Logistica SA to export iron ore produced by his MMX Mineracao e Metalicos, Batista said he will present the project as “a gigantic highway between China and Brazil.”

The “Chinese need to continue to buy raw materials,” Batista said. “Brazil helps China with its food and natural resources security in a big way.”

--With assistance from Michael Tsang in New York. Editors: David Papadopoulos, Laura Zelenko

To contact the reporter on this story: Serena Saitto in Rio de Janeiro at [email protected]. Helder Marinho in Rio de Janeiro at [email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Papadopoulos at [email protected]