French cosmetics group L’Occitane has raised US$704 million from its Hong Kong initial public offering.
L’Occitane, which will be the first French company to list in the city, has sold 364.12 million shares at the top of its indicative price range of HK$12.88 to HK$15.08 per share.
The company’s shares in the public tranche were about 150 times oversubscribed since it began to receive subscriptions from retail investors on Monday, market sources said.
China Investment Corp (中國投資公司), China’s US$300 billion sovereign-wealth fund, invested US$50 million in the offering, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
The company, which is scheduled to list in Hong Kong on May 7, has the option of increasing the offer by 15 percent to raise up to US$810 million in total.
L’Occitane’s managing director Andre Hoffmann said in a video-conference on Sunday that it chose to list in the financial hub because the Asia-Pacific would be “a key growth driver” for its business in the coming years.
About 65 percent of the IPO proceeds will be earmarked for expanding the brand’s presence in high-growth emerging markets such as China, Brazil, Russia, India and Mexico, the company said.
It said it would also open new stores in established markets, including Japan and Germany.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained