Inside Ant Group’s IPO: investors scramble for entry into golden ticket event
- T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Baille Gifford seen at front of queue to claim shares in Hong Kong offering
- Mainland retail investors pledged US$2.8 trillion, a record level of bids for a mainland IPO and more than four times the combined revenues of the FAANGs
Investors, both big and small, anxiously waited on Thursday to find out whether they would be one of the lucky ones to win a golden ticket for a piece of Jack Ma’s Ant Group in the biggest initial public offering in history.
Investors are scrambling to own a slice of the fast-growing digital finance platform. For index trackers, Ant will represent around 40 per cent of Shanghai’s Star Market and roughly 5.5 per cent of Hong Kong’s market capitalisation. The retail tranche in Hong Kong was more than 90 times oversubscribed as of Thursday morning.
Mom and pop investors in Shanghai made pledges worth 19.05 trillion yuan (US$2.8 trillion), nearly four times the combined annual revenue of the so-called FAANG stocks - American technology giants Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. At 872 times more than the value of shares on offer, it was a record level of bids for a mainland IPO.
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What is Jack Ma’s Ant Group and how does it make money?
“The euphoria surrounding Ant’s IPO shares was in line with expectations,” said Ivan Li, Ivan Li, a money manager at Shanghai-based Loyal Wealth Management. “The shares will surge when trading begins on November 5 because strong buying interest in the fintech giant remains.”