Full Truck, China’s ‘Uber for trucks’, to raise US$1.57 billion in US listing

Guiyang-based company plans to sell 82.5 million shares at a price between US$17 a share and US$19 a share on the NYSE
Full Truck Alliance markets its services under the Manbang name in China

Banking & finance

Chad BrayandGeorgina Lee

Published: 2:00pm, 16 Jun 2021

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Full Truck Alliance, a Chinese service similar to Uber Technologies that connects freight shippers and truck drivers, plans to raise up to US$1.57 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.

The Guiyang-based company, which counts SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund and Tencent as investors, said it plans to sell 82.5 million shares at a price between US$17 a share and US$19 a share on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol YMM, according to a regulatory filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Full Truck said it was the world’s biggest digital freight platform, with 173.8 billion yuan (US$27.1 billion) in gross transaction value of goods and 71.7 million orders shipped through its platform last year, according to its prospectus. The company said about 20 per cent of all heavy-duty and medium-duty truckers in China fulfilled orders on its platform last year, with more than 2.8 million truckers using its service. The platform covers more than 300 cities in China, it added.

The company, which markets itself under the Manbang name in China, was created with the merger of truck-booking platforms Yunmanman and Huochebang in 2017.

Following the IPO and a concurrent private placement of shares, Peter Hui Zhang, the company’s founder and CEO, will hold 83.4 per cent of the voting power of the company’s issued and outstanding shares.

Full Truck is at an early stage of monetisation, generating revenue primarily from fees from memberships, freight brokerage and other services. It reported revenue of 2.6 billion yuan in 2020, a 4 per cent increase over the 2.5 billion yuan generated in 2019, but remains a money-losing venture. The company reported a net loss of 3.5 billion yuan in 2020, after posting a 1.5 billion yuan loss the prior year.

In the first three months of this year, Full Truck reported a net loss of 63.3 million yuan.

Underwriters on the transaction include Morgan Stanley, China International Capital Corporation, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Huatai Securities, Citigroup and Nomura.

Full Truck’s IPO follows a slew of Chinese technology companies heading to the US during the second quarter of this year to raise funds. This has happened despite the ratcheting up of US-China tensions after US President Joe Biden expanded the number of blacklisted Chinese technology companies to 59 this month.

The companies raising funds in the US include Didi Chuxing, the country’s largest ride-hailing platform, which last week filed an IPO application in New York. Its fundraising is expected to reach several billion dollars.

Two other Chinese online grocery platforms, Tencent-backed Missfresh and Tiger Global Management-backed Dingdong Maicai, are targeting about US$500 million each, according to people familiar with these transactions, on the Nasdaq and NYSE, respectively.

Others waiting in the wings include AiHuiShou International, which claims to be the largest pre-owned consumer electronics services platform in China. It has filed for a US$280 million IPO on the NYSE.

Deals from Chinese issuers have helped the Nasdaq and NYSE raise a combined US$23.8 billion from 69 IPOs between the start of March and June 15, data from Refinitiv shows. These deals have already surpassed the US$17 billion raised from 40 IPOs for the full-second quarter of 2020.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, looks poised to end the quarter lagging behind the US exchanges. Only eight IPOs had raised US$6 billion for the three-month period until June 15, the lowest amount raised since the first quarter of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began to impact new share sales in the city, data from Refinitiv shows.

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