Retail investors heartily join JD.com’s ‘homecoming’ as they oversubscribe to Hong Kong public offer 179 times

JD.com’s public offering in Hong Kong was 179 times oversubscribed as retail investors rushed to join the latest “homecoming” of a Chinese tech giant, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is the third high-profile secondary listing by a Chinese new economy company in the past eight months, following a US$12.9 billion listing by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding in November and a US$2.7 billion listing this week by NetEase, the world’s second-largest mobile games publisher. Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

The institutional tranche was also multiple times oversubscribed across over 400 accounts, said the people, who declined to be named because the matter was not yet public. The top five investors accounted for about 40 per cent of the institutional tranche, the people said.

The oversubscription of the Hong Kong retail tranche triggered the highest level of a clawback mechanism that increased the size of the local offering to 12 per cent of the overall global offer.

The final pricing came as sentiment soured dramatically on Wall Street on Thursday.