Xiaomi Corp (小米) has selected Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc among international banks for its planned initial public offering (IPO), a person with direct knowledge of the matter said.
Credit Suisse Group AG and Deutsche Bank AG have also been chosen to work on the IPO that could see the company target a valuation of as much as US$100 billion, the person said, asking to not be identified as the details are private.
The Beijing-based company is still considering Chinese underwriters, and is yet to decide on the timing and location of the share sale, the person said.
Xiaomi, which raised money at a US$45 billion valuation in 2014, could be the biggest IPO since Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s (阿里巴巴) US$25 billion debut.
After a disastrous 2016 that saw its market share plunge, the smartphone maker has bounced back by revamping its sales model and pushing heavily into India, where it rivals Samsung Electronics Co as the biggest vendor.
The company topped its annual 100 billion yuan (US$15 billion) sales target by the end of October last year.
Shares of Xiaomi’s rivals fell in Hong Kong.
Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) dropped as much as 1.3 percent, while ZTE Corp (中興) lost 2.2 percent.
Under chairman and cofounder Lei Jun (雷軍), Xiaomi is looking to enter developed markets for smartphones as it consolidates its positions in emerging markets such as India and Russia.
It entered Spain last year and is also said to be talking to US carriers to sell devices on Apple Inc’s home turf.
Apart from smartphones, Xiaomi has backed dozens of start-ups producing a wide spectrum of products from wearables to rice cookers.
Total sales from its ecosystem doubled to 20 billion yuan last year, the company said last month.
Xiaomi takes an undisclosed cut of its partners’ sales, who carry the “Mi” brand on their wares in return for the larger company’s backing and guidance.
Huami Corp (華米), which makes wearable devices, last week filed for a NASDAQ IPO.
Beyond that hardware network, Xiaomi’s experience running an online community of an estimated 200 million and developing software might prove attractive to investors, Counterpoint Research analyst James Yan said.
The company could generate more revenue from in-app ads and harness growing data on its users, for instance, he said.
“The Chinese smartphone market looks stable for Xiaomi, but expanding sales from ecosystem partners could drive Xiaomi’s valuation,” Yan said.
In software, “Xiaomi enjoys a big edge as other Chinese vendors lack a well-established software business,” he added.
Xiaomi’s biggest competitors at home include Huawei Technologies Co (華為) and Oppo Mobile Telecommunications Corp (歐珀移動).
The company plans to build 1,000 “Mi Home” stores by next year — about twice Apple’s global store count — targeting 70 billion yuan of retail sales by 2021.
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
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