US-traded Chinese technology firms such as JD.com and NetEase are
looking for an alternative home closer to the mainland in case tensions between
Washington and Beijing escalate.
Petrochemicals
czar Mukesh
Ambani plans to list his fledgling digital business overseas, Bloomberg
News reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of Jio Platforms’s initial
public offering, which is planned for the next 12 to 24 months.
Going to the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq would make sense. US-traded Chinese technology firms such as JD.com and NetEase are looking for an alternative home closer to the mainland in case tensions between Washington and Beijing escalate, as my colleague Nisha Gopalan wrote this week. Alibaba held a secondary listing in Hong Kong in November. With Washington considering a range of sanctions against Chinese officials and firms as punishment for Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, now may be the perfect time to pitch American investors on the potential of the other internet market with a billion-plus people.
A splashy overseas
foray will be an unusual step for a family that brought the retail equity
culture to India. Dhirubhai Ambani, Mukesh’s late father who founded the
empire, booked a football stadium in Mumbai in 1985 to hold a shareholders’
meeting for the polyester textile maker that he had floated eight years
earlier. But then, Mukesh Ambani is already moving old furniture around as he
pivots flagship Reliance Industries away from an oversupplied energy and
chemicals market. At the same time, he’s beefing up the balance sheet after a
seven-year, $100 billion debt-fueled expansion. A big chunk of that was for
Jio, the wireless carrier that has become India’s largest in less than four
years.
A $7 billion
rights issue, Reliance’s first in three decades, buttressed by more than $10
billion raised in a month from the sale of shares in unlisted Jio Platforms may
help cut the company’s $20 billion of net debt to zero before Ambani’s March
2021 target.
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