IP-Off? Shanghai Stock Exchange suspends Ant Group’s listing
The Shanghai stock exchange has suspended Ant Group’s public listing, which was set for Thursday.
The Chinese fintech firm was set to raise $34.4bn in both Shanghai and Hong Kong through the mammoth dual listing.
Ant Group set the price tag for the Shanghai leg of the float at 68.8 yuan (£7.88) per share, while the Hong Kong tranche was priced at HK$80 (£7.93) per share, recent filings showed.
However, due to significant changes in the regulatory environment, the Shanghai exchange said the company fell short of listing requirements on information disclosure.
Ant Group planned to sell 1.67bn shares in its Shanghai listing, beating the previous record for China’s largest ever IPO set by Agricultural Bank of China in 2010.
The offerings were significantly oversubscribed in both markets and trading had been scheduled to begin on 5 November.
The Chinese regulators reportedly summoned the group’s founder Jack Ma and two top executives to a meeting on Monday during which they were told Ant Group’s online lending business was facing tighter government scrutiny.
Ant Group, which made around $2.6bn in net profit last year, is an affiliate company of Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group and is the world’s most valuable unicorn, with a valuation of $150bn according to a 2018 funding round.
With over a billion users of its Alipay service, Ant is pushing further into financial services offering robo-investing and a lending platform on top of its role as a payments provider and digital wallet app.