Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) is pushing back the start of investor meetings for its initial public offering (IPO) by about a week to answer questions posed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a person with knowledge of the matter said.
The Chinese e-commerce giant, which was previously mulling a plan to begin marketing its IPO early next week, now sees the investor meetings beginning the week of Sept. 8, with tentative pricing on Sept. 18 and trading to start the following day, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
Alibaba, based in Hangzhou, China, has been in discussions with the commission as it seeks regulatory approval of its prospectus. The company has held off rushing the deal, after originally targeting a trading debut earlier this month, a person familiar with the matter said last month.
The investor meetings — called a roadshow — would give Alibaba, founded by billionaire Jack Ma (馬雲), the opportunity to answer questions from the world’s biggest fund managers and build demand for its shares. With Alibaba and selling shareholders expected to raise as much as US$20 billion, the IPO has the potential to be the largest offering in US history.
At US$20 billion, Alibaba’s sale would edge past Visa Inc.’s US$19.65 billion IPO in 2008 as the largest in US history, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
The company, which plans to sell shares on the New York Stock Exchange, may set its IPO value at US$154 billion, or 22 percent below analyst valuations, in a move that could avoid repeating Facebook Inc.’s listing flop, according to the average estimate of five analysts surveyed by Bloomberg last month. The same analysts give Alibaba an average post-listing valuation of US$198 billion, the survey shows.
The founder and chairman Ma, whose assets include a 7.3 percent economic interest in Alibaba, has emerged as China’s richest person, with a net worth of US$21.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts