Ant Group, the financial services affiliate of e-commerce group Alibaba, is seeking $30bn in its initial public offering, Caixin reported yesterday, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.
The $30bn figure would make the offering the largest IPO of all time, surpassing the $25bn raised by Alibaba itself in 2014 and the $29.4bn flotation for oil and gas provider Saudi Aramco in December 2019.
The prospective IPO would consist of $20bn of shares issued on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and $10bn on Shanghai’s Star Exchange, valuing Ant at $200bn. A source told Caixin the company is still in talks with both exchanges but is eyeing September or October 2020 for the offering.
Also known as Ant Financial, Ant Group oversees a range of payment and financial services offerings including Alipay, the mobile payment platform that claims 1.3 billion users, as well as digital bank MyBank, credit scoring service Zhima and consumer lending platform Jiebei.
Silver Lake, General Atlantic, Carlyle Group, GIC, Temasek, Warburg Pincus, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Janchor Partners, Discovery Capital Management, Baillie Gifford, Khazanah Nasional, Primavera Capital and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price supplied $14bn in series C funding for Ant in mid-2018.
The series C round valued the company at $150bn and came after Alibaba had agreed to transfer intellectual property to it in return for a 33% stake earlier in the year.
Postal service China Post and insurers including China Life had joined China Investment Corp, Primavera Capital Group, China Development Bank Capital and China Construction Bank subsidiary CCB Trust in Ant’s $4.5bn series B round, which closed in 2016 at a $60bn valuation.
Ant had previously received an undisclosed amount of series A funding from investors including National Council for Social Security Fund at a valuation of about $50bn in 2015, the year after it was spun off by Alibaba.
