When Industrial and Commercial Bank of Chinabought Bank of East Asia's US arm last month, the deal demonstrated how the world's biggest bank by market value approaches foreign acquisitions.

It is a conservative "follow the money" strategy: ICBC is trailing, not leading, the rest of China Inc.

China's petrochemical, mining and industrial giants have been aggressive in recent years in buying resources around the world and making strategic investments, from deepwater oil assets in Brazil to iron ore mines in Australia.

China's banks, by contrast, have been far more reserved. ICBC has been the boldest in expanding abroad. Yet its acquisitions have all been bite-sized, such that its non-China holdings account for less than 5 per cent of its overall revenues.

Critics say that ICBC has been cautious to a fault, missing some potentially good opportunities. But Chinese investors were burned by a couple of mega-deals before the financial crisis (the sovereign wealth fund invested in Morgan Stanley and Blackstone just months before their stock prices plummeted), and neither banks nor regulators have any appetite for risky acquisitions.

If the size of ICBC's foreign forays have been small, the pace at which it has completed acquisitions and the global spread of these deals have been far more impressive. Over the past two years it has bought banks in Argentina, Thailand and Canada.

ICBC's game plan has been straightforward. It wants to establish a footprint wherever Chinese companies are most active, hence its focus on resource-rich countries and southeast Asia, China's near abroad.

The deal for Bank of East Asia's US operation was, in one respect, groundbreaking: it was the first time that a Chinese bank had acquired full control of a US bank.

But on a strategic level, it was consistent with ICBC's previous deals. First, it was an ultra-cautious move. Bank of East Asia US had just $780m in assets, pocket change for ICBC.

Second, the move into the US was a simple reflection of the fact that more and more Chinese companies are operating there and they want to be served by their own bank. In explaining its rationale, ICBC said that it was already serving large corporate clients in the US and that the acquisition would give it "an entry into the middle and small business lending markets".

Because they are expanding abroad so slowly, Chinese banks do not pose any sort of competitive threat to the Citigroups or JPMorgans of this world for the time being. Yet in following the money, ICBC and its peers are, little by little, turning themselves into institutions with true global reach.