Kuaishou mops up $5.32b from float in Hong Kong

The story of the stunning stock-market debut of Tencent-backed Kuaishou Technology in Hong Kong on Friday is not so short as its e-products－app-based short videos and livestreamed content.

To cut a long story short, Kuaishou shares surged by nearly 200 percent to HK$338 ($43.6) per share from the issue price of HK$115 as oversubscription levels hit a record, and closed the day at HK$300, mopping up a cool HK$41.28 billion. In US dollar terms, it converts to $5.32 billion.

It is the world's largest IPO since May 2019, after Uber Technologies Inc's debut netted $8.1 billion.

With Friday's IPO, the Beijing-based Kuaishou's valuation exceeded 1 trillion yuan ($155 billion), taking it past a slew of prominent listed companies from the internet sector as well as traditional industries, including JD and China Mobile.

Su Hua, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Kuaishou, said the e-platform aims to build "an ecosystem with strong vitality and evolution ability where people and content are connected together".

Kuaishou sold 21.9 million shares in all, which meant the float was oversubscribed 1,204 times. Bloomberg estimates 1.4 million applications were from local investors.

"The successful IPO of Kuaishou is of great positive significance to the monetization of the entire Chinese short video market. It has gathered the most amount of (online) traffic in the country's short video market and has been having a great impact in lower-tier cities," said Jiang Han, senior researcher at market consultancy Pangoal.

Founded in 2011, Kuaishou's revenue streams include sales of virtual items, online marketing services, commissions from e-commerce sales, online knowledge-sharing, and other products and services.

"It is the ability to introduce machine learning-powered recommendation algorithms that finally created the era of short videos typically watched on mobile phones. The culture of watching short videos is changing the daily lifestyle of almost everyone in the world," said Zhang Fei, partner of 5Y Capital, one of Kuaishou's angel investors.

5Y Capital stuck to the startup, backing Kuaishou over a six consecutive fund-raising rounds.

According to Su, the short video platform produced or distributed 13 billion videos and generated 300 billion yuan in gross merchandise volume so far.

More than 20 million people from both cities and remote areas have also gained income from it by uploading their self-produced original content.