Green light for Alibaba's listing to lift confidence in HK's economy
By Luo Weiteng | China Daily | Updated: 2019-11-14 07:25
Chinese mainland e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has got the go-ahead from the Hong Kong stock exchange for a secondary listing that could raise as much as $15 billion, despite almost five months of violent protests in Hong Kong that have rocked the Asian financial center and weighed on investor sentiment.
Such a move, in what could be the city's biggest listing for nine years, comes as a huge boost to the local bourse which had a tough time attracting mega deals this year. It could also stand as a well-timed confidence boost for Hong Kong.
Alibaba said in a statement on Wednesday evening that it plans to issue 500 million new ordinary shares.
Alibaba, which has already been listed on New York's Nasdaq for five years, started a weeklong investor roadshow on Wednesday. Pricing is expected to be confirmed on Nov 20 and share trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange is scheduled to begin in the week of Nov 25, according to reports by the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong English-language newspaper owned by Alibaba.
As data from Refinitiv showed, the total value of first-time shares sales at the Hong Kong stock exchange since the middle of October is $18.5 billion, next only to Nasdaq's $23.3 billion and $21.9 billion at the New York Stock Exchange.
With the gargantuan fundraising from Alibaba, the Hong Kong stock exchange may easily secure a place among the top three in the global IPO league this year, and even retain the much-coveted title as the world's leading venue for listings for two consecutive years at the last minute.
After several quiet months of the year, Hong Kong's IPO market made a huge comeback in September. Anheuser-Busch InBev NV's $5.8 billion IPO of its Asian unit and $1.6 billion float from ESR Cayman, the largest logistics real estate operator in the Asia-Pacific region and backed by private equity giant Warburg Pincus, helped revive the sentiment in the Asia's third-largest stock exchange by market capitalization.
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