It was supposed to be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever. Ant Group was to launch simultaneously on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges on November 5, 2020, with a listing of $37bn. The IPO had seen huge interest since its filing on August 26, seeing a record $3tn in bids for shares from retail investors. It was to far exceed the $29.4bn IPO by Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Saudi Aramco, when it began trading on the domestic Tadawul stock exchange in December 2019. Listing Ant Group in China should have been a long-awaited, and highly feted, market event.
However, only days before it was due to launch, the Chinese regulator brought the IPO to an abrupt halt. On November 2, regulators called in Jack Ma, Ant Group’s controlling shareholder and owner of parent company Alibaba, Ant’s executive chairman, Eric Jing, and CEO Simon Hu for a closed-door meeting. On the same day, the regulators published new draft regulations specifically for China’s sprawling microfinance sector.
