A few companies in Hong Kong, India and Singapore are drawing attention with their seemingly adventurous initial public offering (IPO) plans in an inhospitable global market, but their fundraising mission is less foolhardy than it looks.
Interior designer LC Group and construction firm LEAP Holdings are meeting investors in Hong Kong to pitch their offerings. In India, logistics company Navkar Corp is marketing its IPO, while Prabhat Dairy is launching its share sale this week. In Singapore, autoparts maker Jiangxi Jiangling Chassis Co (江西江鈴底盤) is drawing up plans to tap the equity market.
The deals are small — up to US$241 million in total. However, their compactness means bankers need fewer investors to fill order books. Smaller offerings also tend to attract retail investors.
However, what about the bigger deals? On the radar are a series of sizable offerings including those of China Reinsurance (Group) Corp (中再集團), China Huarong Asset Management Corp (中國華融資產管理) and Taikang Life Insurance Co (泰康人壽保險).
They would need a big group of institutional investors and an army of retail investors to help take their billion-dollar deals over the finish-line. The companies are slated to launch their IPOs in the second half of the year.
Concerns about a prolonged Chinese economic slowdown and fears over volatile shares could force some companies to delay their deals, stunting the run of IPOs this year.
So far this year, IPO issuance in the Asia-Pacific has jumped nearly 25 percent from a year earlier to US$44.5 billion. The real test — bankers and analysts say — will be when and if sizeable offerings move ahead in coming weeks.
“A lot of deals will need to be put on hold under these market circumstances,” Hong Kong-based Phillip Securities Group (輝立證券) corporate finance officer Jasper Chan (陳英傑) said. “Markets won’t recover that soon, not this month. Next year it will get better, but this year I think there’s a lot of uncertainty around the world. It’s not easy to forecast what’s coming,” he said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six