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Ant Group IPO’s Shanghai retail book gets bids for almost $600 bn

By Reuters

  • 29 Oct 2020
Ant Group IPO’s Shanghai retail book gets bids for almost $600 bn
Credit: Reuters

The domestic retail book of Ant Group Co Ltd's $34.4 billion dual listing was 872 times oversubscribed as individual investors in China scrambled for a slice of the world's largest initial public offering (IPO), a company filing showed.

Ant is poised to raise about $17.2 billion on Shanghai's STAR Market and roughly the same in Hong Kong, shattering the record set by Saudi Arabian Oil Co (Saudi Aramco) with its $29.4 billion listing last December.

Investors are rushing to buy into the fast-growing Chinese fintech firm, which operates the country's biggest payments platform and other financial services, despite risks of greater scrutiny at home and abroad.

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The oversubscription equates to investment interest of about 4 trillion yuan ($596.76 billion).

Hangzhou-based Ant, backed by e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, is selling 1.67 billion shares on the Nasdaq-style STAR Market before a so-called greenshoe option for a 15% overallotment of shares.

The company which on Monday set the price of the Shanghai leg at 68.8 yuan ($10.27) per share, was offering 4% of the initial shares to mainly retail investors across the country, having earmarked 80% of the domestic offering to 29 strategic investors who will be locked up for at least one year.

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The remaining 16% of the Shanghai leg had been allotted to non-strategic institutional investors who subscribed for about 76 billion shares, roughly 284 times the initial tranche, according to Ant's filing on Monday.

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