Investors gearing up for the initial public offering (IPO) of Ant Financial Services Group (螞蟻金服), the US$60 billion online finance arm spun off by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Co (阿里巴巴), will have to wait until at least late next year as the business puts growth first, sources said.
Sources with knowledge of the plans said Ant Financial, whose anchor business is Alipay (支付寶), China’s largest online payments service, is focusing on expanding its existing 450 million-strong army of daily users, adding merchants and customers.
One of the sources said that, as of last month, Ant Financial had yet to contact Chinese regulators to start the lengthy listing process and join a queue of more than 700 companies waiting to list.
An Ant Financial spokeswoman said the group had not set a timetable or location for its listing, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission did not comment.
In addition to online payments, Ant Financial also offers services ranging from wealth management to credit scoring, microlending and insurance.
Alibaba Group established Alipay in 2004 in the PayPal mold to help Chinese buyers shop online, and later spun it off ahead of its own listing in 2014.
At its last fundraising round in April, Ant Financial’s valuation topped US$60 billion — just short of the market value of Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Its listing has been among the most keenly awaited of recent years.
It reshuffled top management over the weekend, which Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma (馬雲) yesterday said in Bangkok signaled a listing was a prospect at some point.
“We will be looking at an IPO in the next few years; we are not yet sure where we will list or when exactly,” Ma said.
However, the sources said Ant Financial intends to list both in mainland China and Hong Kong.
The two applications could be simultaneous, although a shorter waiting time could also mean that Hong Kong-listed H shares could come to market first, the sources said.
For growth, Ant Financial is concentrating on expanding a user base that already outnumbers the population of western Europe, growing in China and abroad, where it has focused on partnerships and also wants to capture spending by Chinese tourists when they travel.
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