Chinese online retail titan Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) has been given the go-ahead to list shares in Hong Kong, reports said yesterday, in what could be the territory’s biggest initial public offering (IPO) in almost a decade.
Approval for the sale will also give the territory’s financial authorities a huge boost as Hong Kong is battered by months of pro-democracy protests that have tarnished its image for security and hammered the Hang Seng Index.
Asia’s biggest company yesterday started a weeklong roadshow to garner interest from institutional and retail investors, said Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.
The share price will be agreed on Wednesday next week, with trading in the firm expected in the week of Nov. 25, the report said, citing unnamed sources.
However, Bloomberg News reported speculation on trading floors that the share sale could be affected by protests that are wracking the territory, with the Central business district among the areas targeted by demonstrations.
Alibaba, which is already listed on New York’s NASDAQ, had planned to list in the summer, but called it off owing to the long-running pro-democracy protests and the China-US trade dispute.
If realized, the US$15 billion IPO would be the biggest since insurance giant AIA raised US$20.5 billion in 2010.
However, it is lower than the US$20 billion it had aimed to raise initially.
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