Bottom line: A new plan allowing offshore listed Chinese firms like Alibaba and Tencent to make secondary listings at home appears to have momentum and could stand a better than 50 percent chance of success.
China eyes new plan to bring home NY-, HK-listed firms
A mix of politics and business is in the air this week, as the annual National People’s Congress takes place in Beijing, including a concurrent gathering of business leaders who advise the nation’s legislature. Those leaders include most of the country’s leading high-tech CEOs, who are all getting peppered with questions about whether they would re-list at home if given the chance.
Most of those leaders are doing the politically correct thing and saying “of course,” including chiefs of Internet giants Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU), Tencent (HKEx; 700) and Ctrip(Nasdaq: CTRP), just to name a few. (Chinese article) Such talk is really a bit cheap and would be quite impractical in the current market, since de-listing such massive firms from their current markets would require tens of billions of dollars in most cases, and even hundreds of billions in the case of a massive company like Tencent. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: New listing plans by education firm Redlands and steel-trading platform Zhaogang point to lower-tech offshore IPOs taking center stage in the first half of the year until the situation for fintech candidates stabilizes.
Redlands sees riches in professional education
With fintech offerings in a holding pattern, a stream of lower-tech IPOs are finding their way to market in the first few months of this year. The latest of those is education company Redlands, which has just filed to sell up to $300 million worth of stock in a New York listing. At the same time another lower-tech offering, a steel-trading platform called Zhaogang, is also in the headlines, with media reporting it is gearing up for a Hong Kong listing that could raise up to $500 million.
It’s hard to spot a trend from just two offerings, but these deals do have a particularly low-tech bent to them. That’s probably at least partly because many of the higher-tech offerings in the current market, which were coming from financial technology firms, or fintech, are on hold at the moment due to regulatory uncertainty. That said, education does seem to be a flavor of the moment, at least in part because many of the companies going to market have found ways to quickly scale-up their business using online models. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Xiaomi’s taking of the India smartphone crown and attendance at a major trade show next week are aimed at boosting its profile in the run-up to its IPO.
Xiaomi to attend MWC
Hype is building in the run-up to what’s likely to be one of the largest high-tech IPOs this year, with word that smartphone maker Xiaomi has snatched the India crown from a fading Samsung (Seoul: 005930) and is also making its first visit to the world’s top telecoms trade show next week. Both events are important milestones for a resurgent Xiaomi, as it attempts to boost its profile for a public listing that’s likely to raise in the neighborhood of $10 billion in Hong Kong.
At the same time, the list of attendees for this year’s Mobile World Congress taking place next week in Spain is also notable for a number of brands that have purchased booths in the past but aren’t doing so this year. Leading that list is Oppo, which briefly took the China smartphone crown last year from current leader Huawei. Also absent from the list are past attendees including Meizu and Gionee. That probably speaks to the fact that some of these brands are feeling the squeeze of prolonged competition in the space, and are choosing to spend their limited marketing budgets elsewhere. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A relatively solid debut for wristband maker Huami bodes well for offshore Chinese IPOs outside the financial services sector, including for smartphone giant Xiaomi.
High-tech wristband maker Huami posts modest gain in debut
Different people are putting different spins on the trading debut for the first major Chinese IPO in New York this year, for a company called Huami, which makes fitness trackers and rose 2.3 percent on its first day. From my perspective, this looks like a gravity-defying debut, since the broader market tanked on that same day, with most of the major indexes down around 4 percent in the week’s second major major sell-off.
From a broader perspective, this seems to bode well for offshore Chinese IPOs in the year ahead, at least for those that are in safer sectors like this. Companies from the more volatile fintech sector, which has been the subject of repeated regulation to rein in the sector, could be in for a tougher ride. But this kind of more consumer-related product, which is far less controversial, could enjoy some success on positive sentiment about the broader China consumer market. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Alibaba’s purchase of 33 percent of Ant Financial looks like a shrewd move for both firms, making Ant more attractive in the run-up to an IPO likely to be one of the world’s biggest this year.
Alibaba and Ant back together
In what looks like a homecoming of sorts, e-commerce giant Alibaba(NYSE: BABA) has just announced it is taking back a major stake in its Ant Financial affiliate. Followers of this pair will know they have quite a long and complex relationship, and were actually once part of the same company. But they were split apart around a decade ago for political reasons, which apparently aren’t an issue anymore.
The other major plank to this story is Ant’s own story, including the unusual way in which this deal was structured. The company, whose core asset is the popular Alipay electronic payments service, is gearing up for what could be one of the biggest fintech IPOs of this year, likely to raise several billion dollars in Hong Kong. Thus this particular move could be designed to draw more attention to this lesser-known Alibaba offspring, and also to relieve it of some of its financial burden in the run-up to that offering. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Meituan’s move into shared car services is likely to reignite a price war with incumbent Didi, and could be aimed at generating excitement ahead of a mega-IPO later this year.
Meituan entering shared cars
Just days after reports emerged that car-sharing giant Didi Chuxing would pedal into the shared bike market, new reports are saying that group buying giant Meituan-Dianping is driving into Didi’s own shared car services space. These two stories underscore a theme that comes up time and again in the China tech world, whereby cash-rich companies often pile into hot and trendy sectors where they have little or no experience.
In this case the Meituan move has interesting implications because it could restart a fierce price war that was finally resolved last year when Didi merged with UberChina to take on its current form. Didi has pretty much owned the market since then, though it still faces some competition at various local levels. Now all that could change with the entry of Meituan, which should be flush with cash to launch yet a new round of price wars. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A third-party buyout offer for eHi could presage a wave of similar new bids for undervalued, profitable Chinese companies, while withdrawal of Jumei’s buyout bid could be followed by a new, lower offer.
eHi gets buyout offer
After a period of relative quiet, the privatization wave that swept US-listed Chinese companies nearly two years ago is bubbling back into the headlines with a couple of stories from different directions. In the “leaving” direction there’s car rental comp eHi Car Services (NYSE: EHIC), which has received a third-party offer to privatize for a slight premium to its latest stock price. In the other direction there’s cosmetics e-commerce firm Jumei International (NYSE: JMEI), which is finally withdrawing its management-led buyout offer nearly two years after first receiving the bid.
There’s no broader theme to these two deals, except perhaps that investors have become quite skeptical about such offers. The Jumei deal’s collapse shows why such skepticism is sometimes merited, though it’s also worth pointing out that about two-thirds of US-listed companies that announced plans to privatize during the wave in early 2015 actually completed those plans. Lackluster response to the eHi deal also shows a certain skepticism, probably because shareholders are still worried that many of these buyout bids are low-balling companies’ real values. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: A new crackdown on microlenders could put a slight damper on their growth, but is unlikely to affect them significantly next year unless China experiences a bad debt crisis.
Beijing clamps down on microlenders
Word that China will clamp down on the nation’s thriving field of online microlenders is sending a chill through the sector, as many predict new moves could severely slow down their breakneck growth. The newly-announced crackdown is only aimed at new microlenders, at least for now, with word that the central government has ordered all provinces to immediately stop issuing new licenses for such companies. (English article)
But like everything else in China, where there’s smoke there’s often fire not far behind. In this case, market watchers and participants are expecting this sudden freeze in new licenses is a prelude to a bigger clampdown, which is probably sorely needed. The explosion in microlenders over the last two or three years really does seem a bit out of control, and Beijing is clearly worried about the possibility of mass defaults due to poor risk management in this fledgling industry. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Sogou is unlikely to shed its position as a second-tier search engine anytime soon, despite its ties to Tencent ties, and its stock is also unlikely to be a strong performer over the next 2-3 years.
Sogou pops on debut, but will it hold?
After writing about up-and-coming hot new names like Qudian (NYSE: QD) and ZhongAn Insurance (HKEx: 6060) making blockbuster IPOs over these last few weeks, it feels a bit like going back to the future by writing today about a new listing for search engine Sogou (NYSE: SOGO). The fact of the matter is that Qudian, ZhongAn and just about all of the companies listing in this current wave of IPOs didn’t even exist when Sogou was born, and many of their founders were probably still in college or perhaps younger.
Anyone out there sensing just a tiny bit of skepticism from what I’ve just written isn’t just imagining things. As a longtime China tech reporter, I remember meeting with Charles Zhang, founder of Sogou’s parent Sohu (Nasdaq: SOHU), more than a decade ago, at which time he told me about all the great things in store for his then-fledgling search engine. Fast forward to the present, when it doesn’t seem like much has changed, including Sogou’s ongoing status as a niche player in China’s massive search market. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: The wave of strong sentiment for new offshore IPOs by Chinese companies is running out of steam, but listings before year-end could still get a slight left, especially fintechs.
Hexindai jumps on trading debut
Fintech is hot, and just about everything else is not. That appears to be the message with the latest offshore IPO by a Chinese firm, this time from Hexindai (Nasdaq: HX), a peer-to-peer (P2P) lender that takes in money from small investors and then lends it out to borrowers. Hexindai’s shares initially soared as much as 70 percent in their trading debut before finishing a much more modest but still comfortable 20 percent higher.
We’ll review the latest offshore IPO by a Chinese company in more detail briefly, but I thought this would also be a good opportunity to do a scorecard for a broader flurry of deals that has hit the market in the last month or two to see how they’re doing. The bottom line seems to be quite clear: IPOs from this new generation of financial technology companies, or fintech, are generally doing ok, while just about everyone else is now below their IPO prices. Read Full Post…
Bottom line: Big drops for three China concept stocks recently listed in New York, combined with a pullback for social networking giant Weibo, indicate a recent round of China stock euphoria may have crested.
Secoo continues to drop
Wednesday could go down as a watershed for newly listed China stocks in New York, which posted one of their worst days since a new wave of IPO euphoria began about a month ago. Three of the largest new offerings in New York, online microlender Qudian (NYSE: QD), e-commerce firm Secoo (Nasdaq: SECO) and education firm Rise (Nasdaq: REDU) all fell by 7 percent or more in the latest session.
At the same time, the more stately but still new-ish Weibo (Nasdaq: WB) also dropped by nearly 6 percent after the company announced plans for a $700 million convertible bond and gave some preliminary third-quarter results that clearly didn’t get people too excited. It’s hard to say if there was a single catalyst for this sell-off, which didn’t really go too far beyond these new listing candidates joined by Weibo. Read Full Post…
