By PRUDENCE HO, YVONNE LEE and FIONA LAW

HONG KONG—Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s

$1 billion sale of shares in Industrial Commercial Bank of China Ltd.

overnight was two times oversubscribed, two people familiar with the deal said Tuesday.

In the biggest share sale in Asia this year, the Wall Street bank sold 1.35 billion shares of Hong Kong-listed ICBC in a block trade at 5.77 Hong Kong dollars (74 U.S. cents) each, a 3% discount to their Monday closing price, two people with direct knowledge of the deal said.

In late trading Tuesday, ICBC’s Hong Kong-listed shares were down 2% at HK$5.83, while the benchmark Hang Seng Index was little changed. Its Shanghai-listed shares were unchanged at 4.29 yuan (69 U.S. cents), while the Shanghai Composite Index was down 0.5%.

Goldman’s stake in ICBC, China’s biggest bank by assets, has now fallen under 1%, according to calculations by The Wall Street Journal.

Volatility in ICBC’s shares led Goldman to report a full-year net loss in Asia in 2011, its first since 2008. In the third quarter of 2011, the market value of those shares fell by US$1 billion as the Chinese bank’s shares tumbled, but in the fourth quarter last year, the shares’ value had increased by $334 million.

Still, the ICBC investment has been lucrative for Goldman. Including Monday’s block trade, Goldman has raised more than US$8.6 billion from selling ICBC shares. Goldman first bought a 4.9% stake in ICBC for US$2.58 billion in April 2006, before ICBC’s Hong Kong listing.

Based on a Wall Street Journal calculation, Goldman now holds 2.95 billion shares in ICBC, around 3.4% of ICBC’s Hong Kong-listed shares and 0.8% of its total share base.

Before this week’s share sale, Goldman held 4.3 billion Hong Kong shares in ICBC, according to a filing to the Hong Kong stock exchange, representing less than 5% of the H shares and 1.24% of the total share base.

“We have no immediate plans to sell more shares in ICBC,” Goldman spokesman Edward Naylor said.

The sale will help boost Goldman’s capital ratio as tougher global capital requirements take effect. The Basel III capital-requirement rules, agreed to by the leaders of the Group of 20 leading international economies, make it more expensive to hold minority stakes in financial institutions.

Write to Prudence Ho at prudence.ho@wsj.com, Yvonne Lee at yvonne.lee@wsj.com and Fiona Law at fiona.law@wsj.com