LinkDoc, the China-headquartered medical data technology provider backed by e-commerce firm Alibaba, has postponed plans to go public, DealStreetAsia reported yesterday, citing three sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
Founded in 2014, LinkDoc provides healthcare data management software and made a $75m net loss in 2020 from $144m in revenue.
The company filed for an initial public offering on the Nasdaq Global Select Market last month and set a price range on Wednesday of $17.50 to $19.50 for more than 10.8 million American depositary shares, potentially raising $211m if it floated at the top of that range.
The decision to put the offering on hold is almost certainly the result of the decision by Chinese regulators to pull domestic ride hailing app Didi from local app stores due to data sharing concerns, just days after it floated in the United States in a $4.4bn IPO.
The move caused Didi’s share price to fall more than 20% and follows on from stringent actions taken towards financial services provider Ant Group in November 2020 shortly before its own offering.
Several publicly listed Chinese companies have seen their share price fall in the aftermath of the move, which has strengthened concerns about the reliability of buying shares in Chinese tech companies in general. Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu have all seen their share price drop 10% or more in the past five days.
Alibaba subsidiary Alibaba Health provided $59.3m in funding for LinkDoc in February this year, adding to $153m from CBC Capital, CICC Capital, Youshan Capital, iFOF, China Broadband Capital (CBC), Ally Bridge Group, Cenova Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) in its two previous rounds.
The company’s largest external shareholders are Temasek’s Esta Investments unit (11.2%), NEA (10.2%), CBC (9.2%), Alibaba Health (8.4%) and MBK Management 6.3%. The underwriters for the IPO are Morgan Stanley, BofA Securities and CICC.
