Renren Inc (人人), China’s largest social-networking service, filed to raise as much as US$584 million in an initial public offering to fund expansion.
Renren plans to sell 53.1 million US depositary receipts for US$9 to US$11 each in an initial public offering, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The ADRs represent 159.3 million Class A ordinary shares, according to the filing.
The company expects proceeds from the IPO of about US$508 million, and will use them to woo more visitors as it competes with local rivals Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) and Baidu Inc (百度) in the world’s most populous Internet market. Renren — a name that means “everyone” in Chinese — has similar features to Facebook, which is blocked in China.
No US social-networking sites have gone public, even as their popularity and advertising revenue soar.
That’s created pent-up demand among investors. LinkedIn Corp, which announced plans in January to raise US$175 million in an IPO, may become the first.
Renren has more than 160 million registered users, according to Analysys International in Beijing.
Advertising has more than doubled each year since the site started selling space in 2008, the company has said.
The online advertising market will triple to almost US$13 billion in China by 2014, estimates Susquehanna International Group LLP.
Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Credit Suisse Group AG will lead the IPO. The ADRs will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker RENN, the prospectus showed.
Renren traces its roots back to 2005, when graduates of Tsinghua University in Beijing founded Xiaonei.com (校內), or “Inside School.” That was the year after Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, created his service for fellow Harvard University students.
In 2006, Xiaonei was acquired by closely held Oak Pacific Interactive Corp, which renamed the service Renren in 2009. Softbank Corp, Japan’s fastest-growing mobile-phone carrier, is the biggest shareholder in Beijing-based Oak Pacific.
Facebook does have some Chinese users, who circumvent censors through so-called virtual private networks, according to data compiled by Socialbakers.com, a site dedicated to analyzing Facebook statistics.
The Palo Alto, California-based company is talking with potential partners about how to gain a foothold in China, a person familiar with the matter said this month.
Entering the country would give Facebook access to the world’s largest Internet market, with more than 457 million Web users.
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