Ant Group Plans to Raise the Biggest IPO Money of $34.4 Billion

Ant Group backed by Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce platform Alibaba and the richest man in China, plans to sell shares valued at $34.4 billion or £26.5 billion on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

The company’s advisers set the price on Monday as demand among top global investors surged.

Once the company is listed on the two exchanges, Ant Group would have raised the most money in a single IPO and exceeded the previous record of $29.4 billion set by Saudi Aramco in December 2019.

It should be noted that Ant, an online payment, is only selling around 11 percent of its total shares. Therefore, putting the market value of the Financial Technology (fintech) giant at around $313 billion, the exact valuation of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and four times bigger than Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

“This was the first time such a big listing, the largest in human history. We wouldn’t have dared to think about it five years, or even three years ago,” Mr Ma said of the deal.

Mr. Ma, according to findings, owned Ant shares worth around $16 billion, taking his total net worth to about $80 billion once the company is listed.

The preliminary price consultation showed institutional investors through Shangai IPO subscribed for over 76 billion shares or more than 284 times of the initial offline offering, according to the Ant Shanghai announcement.

Ant, the fintech company that runs Alipay, the main online payment system in China, said the volume of payments performed by the company in the financial year ended June 2020 was $17.6 trillion.

Alipay now has 1.3 billion users with Chinese accounting for most of its users while the rest comes from its nine e-wallet partners.