Kuzhou, the main Chinese competitor of TikTok, is about to land on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and could collect more than six billion dollars. According to the calculations of Financial Times, if indeed the IPO reached a similar level, it would be the richest initial offer for a tech company since the inception of Uber, which in May 2019 raised more than eight billion dollars on Wall Street.
The British financial newspaper writes that the valuation of individual shares should be between 13 and 14 dollars, bringing the float to a value between 4,9 and 5,4 billion dollars. However, bankers could exercise the over-allotment option, whereby more shares than are being offered can be allotted in order to stabilize the share price, which would drive up supply up to $6,3 billion.
Just like TikTok, Kuaishou offers a livestreaming service for short movies. The app was developed by Beijing Kuaishou Technology Co. Ltd, headquartered in Beijing, e 22% of the capital is in the hands of Tencent, the Chinese Internet giant which in the first nine months of 2020 suffered operating losses of $1,4 billion.
Kuaishou runs every day an impressive amount of visitors: about 262 million, as the sum of the inhabitants of Italy, Germany, France and Great Britain. Each of them, on average, spends almost an hour and a half in front of the screen a day (86 minutes).
Kuaishou's listing on the stock exchange comes at a time of deep uncertainty for the Hong Kong market, after Beijing prevented in extremis the IPO-monstre of Ant Group, Alibaba's virtual payments company which aimed to raise more than 35 billion dollars.
The Kuaishou IPO is managed by Bank of America, China Renaissance Group and Morgan Stanley. The start of trading is set for February 5th.
