- General
- October 29, 2020
- 5 minutes read
Ant IPO Snags Big Wins For Backers
Henry Kravis, Co-CEO, KKR.Photo credit: fortuneglobalforum, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The imminent initial public offering of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group…
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| Henry Kravis, Co-CEO, KKR. Photo credit: fortuneglobalforum, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 |
The imminent initial public offering of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group is set to clinch big profits for many of its outside backers who got a single chance to invest in the company just two years ago, among them big-names including Singapore’s GIC and Temasek Holdings, Carlyle Group, Warburg Pincus, Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional, and individual investors such as Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing and Henry Kravis, the Co-CEO of private equity juggernaut KKR.
Since its founding, Ant only raised outside funding once when it secured $10 billion from a host of investors in 2018 at a valuation of $150 billion. Now, with Ant’s targeted IPO valuation hovering at $310 billion, it seems that the company’s backers could be doubling the value of their investments after just two years.
In 2018 when Ant raised $10 billion, foreign backers including the sovereign wealth funds of Singapore and Malaysia, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and US private equity firms General Atlantic, Silver Lake, Warburg Pincus, and Carlyle Group chipped in at least $500 million each into the round. Americal mutual funds BlackRock and Fidelity Investments invested between $200 million to $500 million, as indicated by Ant’s prospectus.
Individual buyers including Li Ka-shing and KKR’s Henry Kravis chipped in significant amounts into Ant and are set to make high returns. In the case of Kravis, he personally invested around $35 million in Ant after his firm KKR considered but later passed on investing in the Chinese fintech company, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ant is set to raise at least $34.4 billion from two legs of its public offering, one in Hong Kong and another in China, and break the current record for the highest amount ever raised in a public offering. Currently, Saudi state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco holds the world record after raising $29.4 billion in its IPO last year but Ant is now set to surpass that by a substantial margin.
