Alibaba’s Ant Group to hold initial public offering

Some 20 percent of people among the Hong Kong population have participated in the initial public offering in Hong Kong of Ant Group, a fintech subsidiary of China’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba.

According to the South China Morning Post and other sources on Sunday, 1.55 million individual investors applied to purchase shares in Ant Group through the IPO for Hong Kong residents. It represents one fifth of the Hong Kong population, and constitutes the largest ever number that exceeds 970,000 people who applied to buy shares in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China when it went public in 2006. A total of 167.7 billion U.S. dollars have been deposited by those individuals to purchase Anti Group shares.

Ant Group is the operator of “Alipay,” an online payment platform that was used to settle transactions worth 17 trillion dollars in the first half of the year. The company will raise about 34.5 billion dollars through the IPO. It is more than the investment (29 billion dollars) raised through the IPO of Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco in December last year, which was previously the largest. If successful, Ant Group will be on par with JP Morgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, in terms of market capitalization.


Hee-Chang Park ramblas@donga.com