The late Anwar Sadat, when president of Egypt, called 1973 his autumn of destiny. I call 2020 my autumn of destiny because four of the world’s top software/fintech will go public in IPOs in Hong Kong or New York. Each of these IPOs will be fabulously profitable for investors who are able to get allocations in these deals. The Fab Four IPOs in my autumn of destiny are Ant Financial in Hong Kong along with Snowflake, Asana and Airbnb in New York.
Despite my scepticism about chopstick capitalism, the $30bn Ant Financial IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is too yummy to ignore. This will be the world’s largest IPO on 15 October on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, larger than even Saudi Aramco’s offering in Riyadh last year. I hear the IPO will be priced at a valuation of $230bn to $250bn, and I would not be surprised to see Ant Financial trade up to $300bn in its first five hours as a public company. The grapevine in Hong Kong tells me that this IPO will be oversubscribed by at least five to six times and allocations are white hot.
This is the world’s biggest fintech deal and the fastest-growing digital financial conglomerate, with a 30% to 35% bottom-line CAGR. The Alipay superapp is the global money-making engine, with 700 million monthly users and 80 million enterprise clients in the Middle Kingdom. This monster IPO is blessed by Beijing’s Politburo and thus enjoys Master Confucius’s mandate of heaven. So the CIO of every major pension fund and overseas Chinese family office in Asia will gladly turn cartwheels to accumulate the shares before the IPO.
