What it takes to be an Asian ECM powerhouse
Last week, news that Deutsche Bank would fold its global equities business and terminate almost 20,000 of its employees came as a shock for market observers. read
Tag: US
The perils of direct listing
Last week, Slack Technologies Inc., a San Francisco-based software company which designs and develops real-time messaging for businesses, listed on the New York Stock Exchange in an offering that valued it at about US$24 billion. read
The Hong Kong paradox
What once looked like a healthy and steady pipeline of IPOs across Europe and the US has evaporated in a flash. read
The end of the affair
Last week, Hong Kong’s plans to play host to IPOs of international behemoths such as Saudi Aramco took a serious hit, amid news that both Glencore and Tapestry, the owner of luxury fashion brand Coach, would delist from the local exchange. read
Hong Kong is not fit for unicorns
The filing of form S-1, the draft registration statement for the proposed $3bn New York IPO of Snap, the $25bn parent company of messaging app Snapchat, was full of surprises — not all of them good for investors. If anything, it also showed that Hong Kong will, most likely, never be able to compete with the US exchanges when it comes to listing unicorns. read
From the Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom
As the US$100bn-plus IPO of Saudi Aramco nears its launch, the UK’s Telegraph has most recently hinted at a three-way foreign listing, conducted across London, New York and Hong Kong. I look at the practicalities and advantages (as well as disadvantages) for the oil behemoth of listing in Asia. read
Take that to the bank
Another week, another financial sector IPO in Hong Kong. So far this year, three such listings have come to market in the city, for a total of more than $2.6bn equivalent. Most notably, these have included IPOs by Bank of Tianjin ($948m) and China Zheshang Bank ($1.7bn), both of which priced their offerings near the bottom end of the indicative price range last week. read
Hong Kong doesn’t need weighted voting rights
At long last, the operator of Hong Kong’s stock exchange has published conclusions to its concept paper on weighted voting rights (WVRs). Almost as soon as it did, Hong Kong’s other regulator expressed its opposition to the idea. But WVRs were always a worrying development. More urgent reforms are needed for the exchange to compare favourably with New York or London. read
Hong Kong IPOs: between a rock an a hard place
2014 so far as been a bit of a bumper year for IPOs in Hong Kong, despite the well-publicized loss of Alibaba’s landmark listing to the New York Stock Exchange. According to Dealogic, no fewer than 78 of these have taken place on HKEx year-to-date, for a combined amount of US$17.1 billion equivalent. That’s more than twice the volume of IPOs achieved in the first nine months of 2013, when 43 deals had successfully made it to closing. read
Chinese investment banks on the rise
I gave a video interview to Asia banking reporter Enda Curran from the Wall Street Journal. read