Just when you thought Hong Kong’s initial public offering (IPO) market could not get any frothier, a bubble tea maker has surged 217 percent on its debut.
Shares of B & S International Holdings Ltd (賓仕國際控股), known for a famous franchise called TenRen (天仁), is having the strongest trading debut of this year, rallying to HK$3.17 at 2:48pm yesterday, after pricing at HK$1.
With orders for 2,601 times as many shares as were sold, the IPO was the most oversubscribed among 51 Hong Kong IPOs this year and the second-most ever.
Hong Kong IPOs are sizzling this year.
The initial retail portion of an average offering has been 225 times subscribed this year, more than double the level last year, data compiled by Bloomberg showed.
Franchised under brands including TenRen, B & S runs 42 retail outlets in Hong Kong.
The company generated about 43 percent of its revenue from the retail business for the five months that ended on Aug. 31 last year, its share sale prospectus showed.
“This is an irrational rally driven by speculators chasing a relatively small stock,” said Ronald Wan (溫天納), chief executive of Partners Capital International (博大資本國際) in Hong Kong. “It’s just a franchise chain and we have numerous Taiwanese bubble tea companies in Hong Kong.”
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