The online news portal of the People's Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, has raised 1.38 billion yuan (HK$1.7 billion) in an initial share offering in Shanghai - more than double its target.
People.cn, the first state-run news website to list, sold 69.1 million shares at 20 yuan each, it told the Shanghai stock exchange on Thursday.
Earlier this week, it set the offering's price range at 20 to 22.5 yuan a share. Though the final price was at the bottom of the indicative range, the figure represents a price-earnings (PE) ratio of 46.1.
The average PE ratio of A-share stocks in Shanghai is 14.6, according to exchange data.
To be sure, investors' enthusiastic response to the listing is particularly impressive, given the sluggish market sentiment.
'Institutional investors are showing interest in the state-owned news portal because People.cn is the first of its kind,' said Qiao Mu, director of the International Communication Research Centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University. But the enthusiasm does not reflect the portal's real value, he says. The 13.8 million shares allotted for institutional investors in the offline bidding system were 56 times oversubscribed, while the remaining 55.3 million shares offered to the general public were 51 times oversubscribed.