(ATF) Ant Group – the finance arm of Alibaba – will raise its IPO funding target to $35 billion, according to Zhejiang News. Alibaba’s enterprises are based in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang, China’s most affluent province.
Previous reports stated that Ant Group planned to raise $30 billion in funding. If the figure reported by Zhejiang News is correct, this will make the Ant Group’s listing the world’s largest IPO, surpassing the $25 billion its parent company Alibaba raised in New York in 2014 and Saudi Aramco’s record sum of $25.6 billion set last December.
On September 18, the Shanghai Stock Exchange issued an announcement approving the listing application of Ant Group on the STAR market.
From the initial acceptance of the IPO application on August 25 to the meeting on September 18, the Shanghai review of the Ant Group took only 25 days.
In the information disclosed by the Ant Group, in 2017, 2018, 2019, and January-June 2020, the Ant Group achieved operating income of 65.396 billion yuan, 85.722 billion yuan, 120.618 billion yuan and 72.528 billion yuan, respectively. Profits were 6.95 billion yuan, 667 million yuan, 16.957 billion yuan and 21.234 billion yuan.
The listing of Ant Group may change the SSE Composite Index’s excessive weighting of banking, insurance, securities and real estate and non-ferrous metals firms. It will inject new financial technology factors into the SSE Composite Index and change the long-term downturn in the index.
Liu Ti, deputy general manager of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, once said that with the listing of companies such as Ant Group and Geely Automobile on the Sci-tech Innovation Board, the board’s total market value could exceed 5 trillion yuan. In less than a month, the SSE Science and Technology Innovation Board’s review team completed two rounds of “inquiry”, which not only made it professional, but also gave the public a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of Ant Group.
Industry insiders also praised the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s example, the paper said.
The provincial paper said: “This new stock cannot be underestimated. In the future, it is worth looking forward to whether Ant Group will become the leading golden goose of listed companies in Zhejiang.”
