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szdaily -> Business/Markets -> 
Ant plans dual listing in HK, Shanghai
    2020-07-22  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

ANT Group, the fintech arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, said Monday it has started the process of a dual listing in Hong Kong and on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-style STAR Market, kicking off one of the world’s most hotly anticipated initial public offerings (IPOs).

Ant is the world’s most valuable tech “unicorn” — a startup valued at more than US$1 billion. It would become the first company to list both in Hong Kong and on the STAR Market and its IPO should boost the status of both Hong Kong and Shanghai as capital market centers.

The firm, China’s dominant mobile payments company, did not disclose the size, timetable or other details of the offering in its statement Monday.

Ant, which was spun off from Alibaba in 2011, has long been preparing to step up plans for eventually going public in Hong Kong and on the mainland. It has quietly brought back together many of its corporate finance team, some of whom had moved to other roles in recent years.

“The innovative measures implemented by the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market and the Hong Kong stock exchange have opened the doors for global investors to access leading edge technology companies from the most dynamic economies in the world and for those companies to have greater access to the capital markets,” said Ant Group’s executive chairman, Eric Jing.

China is gradually switching from its tightly-controlled IPO system where every float needs approval to a more registration-based scheme similar to the United States and other developed markets, which it piloted with the launch of Shanghai’s tech-focused STAR Market last year.

In late March, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, operator of the STAR Market, said the board could now include fintech and technology services firms.

JD Digits, the fintech arm of e-tailer JD.com, has also been preparing for going public on the STAR Market.

Hong Kong implemented listing reforms in 2018 that paved the way for tech firms with weighted voting rights and for early-stage biotechnology companies to list.

Companies raised nearly US$7 billion via IPOs on the STAR Market in the first half of this year, making the bourse the second biggest market globally for IPOs, behind Nasdaq but ahead of Shanghai’s main board and Hong Kong, according to Refinitiv data.

The crown jewel of the sprawling Alibaba empire, Ant has been accelerating its evolution into an online mall for everything from loans and travel services to food delivery, in a bid to claw back shoppers lost to Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Ant’s chief executive officer Simon Hu has said that he wants people to think of Alipay as more than just a niche provider of financial services and the payments gateway for the world’s biggest e-commerce platform. Part of that is to grow Ant’s reach in Asia, where it has been working with digital payment providers in India and Thailand as well as peddling its expertise in wealth management and risk controls.

Dual listings, once the preferred route for China’s largest corporations from banks to oil and gas producers, have fallen out of favor in part because of the complexities involved in orchestrating share sales across very different capital regimes. (SD-Agencies)

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