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https://scmp.com/business/money/article/2028788/zto-express-targets-biggest-china-ipo-us-alibaba
Business/ Money

ZTO Express Targets Biggest China IPO in U.S. Since Alibaba

Employees work at a sorting centre of Zhongtong (ZTO) Express ahead of the Singles Day shopping festival, Chaoyang District, Beijing, November 8, 2015. On China's giant Singles Day internet shopping festival, the country's delivery firms are stretched so thin that they are looking for tie-ups, listings and new investors to husband their resources. E-commerce has been a huge boon to the logistics industry, but the ever-bigger Singles Day, run by leading online market company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd on Nov. 11 every year, exacerbates the industry's twin dilemmas of cut-throat competition and rising labor costs. With low barriers to entry, express couriers proliferated rapidly over the past decade to more than 8,000 firms, squeezing profit margins to about 5 percent, down from 30 percent 10 years ago, according to analysts. Photo: Reuters

(Bloomberg) -- ZTO Express Inc., a Shanghai-based delivery company, aims to raise as much as $1.3 billion in the biggest U.S. initial public offering by a Chinese entity since its key customer Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. went public.

The company is marketing 72.1 million American depository receipts, or ADRs, for $16.50 to $18.50 apiece, according to a filing Friday. A successful sale would rank No. 7 among all IPOs by Chinese companies on a U.S. exchange, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Online retailer Alibaba, which uses ZTO Express to fulfil orders, raised $25 billion in 2014 in the biggest such offering on record.

ZTO Express also counts Chinese online retail giant JD.com Inc. among its customers. It handled 2.9 billion packages in 2015, according to its IPO prospectus, up 62 percent from a year earlier. The 827.7 million packages ZTO Express transported in the first quarter of 2016 made up 14 percent of all express parcels delivered in China, according to iResearch, cited in the company’s deal prospectus.

Founded in 2002, ZTO Express plans to use the proceeds from the IPO to buy land, trucks and sorting equipment, build facilities and for general corporate purposes.

ZTO Express posted net income of $200.4 million on revenue of $915.8 million in 2015. In the first six months of this year, net income was $115.1 million on $638.8 million in revenue.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are leading the offering. The company will list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ZTO.