Another day, another initial public offering (IPO), another Chinese billionaire magically appears.
Mu Rongjun (穆榮均), the cofounder of food-delivery behemoth Meituan Dianping (美團點評), is poised to be the latest to join the club as the company announced plans to go public last month. Of the 27 billionaires to surface in Asia this year, about a third did so through IPOs in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index showed.
Now the question is whether that torrid pace of wealth creation can continue as global trade tensions mount and markets struggle to hold gains.
Investor demand already appears to be flagging for Xiaomi Corp’s (小米) upcoming US$4.7 billion debut, with some institutional investors seeing bids for the Chinese smartphone maker’s shares as low as HK$15.20 on Thursday, with no offers in gray-market trading, people familiar with the matter said.
That is 11 percent below the issue price.
Market volatility fueled by fears of a trade war could pose challenges for Meituan Dianping ahead of the IPO, said Ryan Roberts, a senior analyst at MCM Partners in Hong Kong.
“There are definitely arguments that there are some valuation bubbles in Chinese technology companies, especially for those that have not yet turned profitable, which can make establishing their valuation difficult in a public offering,” Roberts said. “Investors backing the IPO need to have conviction that profitability and cash flow generation are on the horizon at some point — not just a promise.”
Meituan Dianping, backed by top shareholder Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊), posted a loss of 19 billion yuan (US$2.86 billion at the current exchange rate) last year, as spending on marketing and research ballooned. Mu has a US$1.4 billion fortune with his 2.5 percent holding in the company. The Beijing-based firm declined to comment.
The January IPO of C-Mer Eye Care Holdings Ltd (希瑪眼科醫療控股) produced this year’s first new Chinese billionaire, Dennis Lam (林順潮), who also became Hong Kong’s first billionaire ophthalmologist.
Xiaomi’s offering could produce at least three others, while the debut of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (時代新能源科技), the world’s biggest maker of batteries for electric vehicles, brought four within its first week of trading.
Those eight tycoons, along with Mu, had a combined net worth of US$18.5 billion as of Tuesday.
Deloitte has forecast that Hong Kong and mainland IPO markets would raise as much as US$54 billion for about 340 companies by the end of this year.
The Eurovision Song Contest has seen a surge in punter interest at the bookmakers, becoming a major betting event, experts said ahead of last night’s giant glamfest in Basel. “Eurovision has quietly become one of the biggest betting events of the year,” said Tomi Huttunen, senior manager of the Online Computer Finland (OCS) betting and casino platform. Betting sites have long been used to gauge which way voters might be leaning ahead of the world’s biggest televised live music event. However, bookmakers highlight a huge increase in engagement in recent years — and this year in particular. “We’ve already passed 2023’s total activity and
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) today announced that his company has selected "Beitou Shilin" in Taipei for its new Taiwan office, called Nvidia Constellation, putting an end to months of speculation. Industry sources have said that the tech giant has been eyeing the Beitou Shilin Science Park as the site of its new overseas headquarters, and speculated that the new headquarters would be built on two plots of land designated as "T17" and "T18," which span 3.89 hectares in the park. "I think it's time for us to reveal one of the largest products we've ever built," Huang said near the
China yesterday announced anti-dumping duties as high as 74.9 percent on imports of polyoxymethylene (POM) copolymers, a type of engineering plastic, from Taiwan, the US, the EU and Japan. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce’s findings conclude a probe launched in May last year, shortly after the US sharply increased tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, computer chips and other imports. POM copolymers can partially replace metals such as copper and zinc, and have various applications, including in auto parts, electronics and medical equipment, the Chinese ministry has said. In January, it said initial investigations had determined that dumping was taking place, and implemented preliminary
CUSTOMERS’ BURDEN: TSMC already has operations in the US and is a foundry, so any tariff increase would mostly affect US customers, not the company, the minister said Taiwanese manufacturers are “not afraid” of US tariffs, but are concerned about being affected more heavily than regional economic competitors Japan and South Korea, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said. “Taiwan has many advantages that other countries do not have, the most notable of which is its semiconductor ecosystem,” Kuo said. The US “must rely on Taiwan” to boost its microchip manufacturing capacities, Kuo said in an interview ahead of his one-year anniversary in office tomorrow. Taiwan has submitted a position paper under Section 232 of the US Trade Expansion Act to explain the “complementary relationship” between Taiwan and the US
RSS