Sun Qinghuan (孫清煥), chairman of MLS Co (木林森), China’s biggest LED manufacturer, is set to become a billionaire with the firm’s initial public offering (IPO).
MLS is planning to sell 44.5 million shares at a price of 21.5 yuan on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, according to a filing made on Monday.
Sun is expected to own about 357 million shares after the IPO, giving him a net worth of about US$1.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB
Sun, 42, joins a rising number of Chinese entrepreneurs who have become billionaires as investors drive up the values of newly traded companies. The light-bulb maker last year was ranked the world’s 10th-biggest for packaged LED, or light- emitting diode, according to market research firm IHS Technology.
“It’s grown to become a big company,” said Alice Tao, an LED and lighting industry analyst at IHS in Shanghai. “In China, there are very few other LED companies that have that kind of size and scale to compete with global LED manufacturers like Samsung, Osram or Philips.”
OVERSUBSCRIBED
The IPO was 65 times oversubscribed, according the company’s filing. The Shenzhen Composite Index, tracking the smaller of China’s two stock exchanges, rose 1.6 percent at the close on Monday, the first gain in a week.
An MLS representative who answered the company’s main telephone line declined to comment ahead of the IPO.
MLS products are used in computer appliances, traffic lights and shopping malls, according to its Web site. Its product line-up and research and development innovation are among its strengths, Changjiang Securities (長江証券) said in a report earlier this month. The firm expects MLS shares to trade between 26 yuan to 33 yuan after their debut.
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