Jack Ma’s Ant Group broke records on Wednesday (Oct. 28), filing the biggest initial public offering (IPO) to date, with expectations of raising $34.4 billion on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges, according to multiple reports.
Ant stopped taking orders from institutional buyers a day early because of overwhelming demand, sources familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday (Oct. 28).
Ant Group’s runaway IPO will also pay off for several investment banks. In Hong Kong, for example, about $198 million could potentially be collected in underwriter fees, according to a filing, per the WSJ.
Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and China International Capital Corp led the Hong Kong share sale. CICC and China Securities Co. are leading the Shanghai listing.
The billionaire founder of China’s eCommerce giant Alibaba, an Ant Group affiliate, Ma is poised to add some $27 billion to his fortune after the IPO, a Forbes report said. After proceeds, it is estimated that Ma will be worth $68 billion. The Ant IPO is also expected to create at least 18 additional billionaires.
Ma, a former English teacher, is the 12th richest man in the world and is China’s richest man. China is the world’s second-biggest economy; only the U.S. has more billionaires.
About 1.7 billion shares were listed on each exchange. Ant’s listing topped Saudi Aramco’s $29.4 billion sale of stock last year. Before that, Alibaba held the record for the biggest IPO at $25 billion in 2014.
Chinese firms are filing IPOs in record numbers against a backdrop of political uncertainty that includes the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 3. During the first three quarters of 2020, Shanghai had 180 global public listings and was the top IPO market.
Alibaba, which Ma founded in 1999, owns about one-third of Ant. He then created Alipay in 2004, which is Ant’s most visible unit.
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