The shares closed at 300 Hong Kong dollars ($ 38.70) each, marking a 161% jump from the 115 Hong Kong dollars ($ 14.80) that the company issued. He raised a total of 41.28 billion Hong Kong dollars ($ 5.32 billion) in the offer.
If the company exercises an excess distribution option, the total collected could reach 47 billion Hong Kong dollars (almost $ 6.1 billion).
It is the largest technology listing in the world since Uber’s IPO in May 2019, and the largest global public offering since Saudi Aramco in December 2019, according to data provider Eikon Refinitiv.
Kuaishou is one of China’s leading social media companies. The company supported by Tencent, whose name means “fast hand” in Chinese, has a homonymous application of short video and live streaming. Its platforms and mini-programs have more than 300 million daily active users.
He gets most of his revenue from the live streaming business, where users can buy virtual items and present them as gifts to their favorite hosts. Live streaming transactions accounted for 84% of revenue in 2019, according to a stock exchange file. It also makes money from online advertising.
The company’s listing has been widely awaited for months. In a filing this week, he said the offer was heavily underwritten.
“This is an incredible result,” said David Chao, co-founder and general partner of DCM, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with $ 4 billion under management. His company was one of the first investors in Kuaishou, leading one of its first rounds of financing in 2014.
DCM still has a 9.2% stake in the social network, which is worth more than $ 14 billion in current market value on Friday. The company said it would generate a return of about 600 times its original investment.
By focusing from the outset on increasing live streaming and virtual goods, Chao said the company has explored “a new form of monetization that the US is just beginning to understand”.
Kuaishou is the latest company to be successful in going public in Hong Kong, which spent the past year reinventing itself as a hot spot for Chinese technology companies.
Since 2019, Alibaba (NANNY), NetEase (NTES) and JD.com (JD) all had secondary listings in the Asian financial center. The city also made changes last year with the aim of attracting even more companies. The index compiler Hang Seng Indexes, for example, launched a technology index similar to that of Nasdaq to track the largest technology companies operating in the city.
Although his listing proves a major victory, Kuaishou still faces significant challenges. It has long competed with industry leader ByteDance, owner of the Douyin app – the Chinese version of TikTok.
The listing also comes at a time when the technology sector is facing regulatory restriction in China. In his prospectus, Kuaishou alluded to this risk, pointing to “the fact that the Internet business is highly regulated in China”.
– Laura He and Jill Disis contributed to this report.
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