Yulong Eco-Materials raises $14m in US IPO

Yulong Eco-Materials Ltd has raised $14 million in an initial public offering on the Nasdaq Stock Market in New York.

Yulong is a producer of flyash bricks and concrete in and around Pingdingshan — a city of nearly 5 million people in Henan province.

Trading on Nasdaq under the symbol YECO, the Chinabased construction waste recycling company sold 2.25 million American depositary shares on June 26. Axiom Capital Management managed the deal for Yulong, and has been granted a 45-day option to purchase an additional 338,000 shares.

Yulong shares priced at $6.25, the low end of the $6.25$7.25 range the company had initially set. Shares opened at $6.25 and ranged from $5.65 to $6.38, before closing at $6.17.

Chinese companies with ecofriendly products should see a boost due to the government’s increased focus on the environment, said Yulong Zhu, CEO of Yulong Eco-Materials Ltd.

“All are thinking that China will put more emphasis on anti-pollution policy and regulations, which means there will be a very big market for our business,” Zhu told China Daily in March. “The government has also expressed that it’s going to increase the speed of urbanization, which will give the whole construction market a big stimulus, too.”

Yulong, which controls nearly 51 percent of the brick market and 30 percent of the concrete market in Pingdingshan, according to company data, employs about 250 people through Yulong Concrete and Yulong Brick — founded in 2004 and 2006, respectively.

Zhu said he started working in construction in the 1990s, in the steel and cement industries. Soon he began investing in the manufacturing of construction materials, like concrete, before forming Yulong Eco-Materials in the early 2000s.

“I started thinking of my recycling business from the other ways people made bricks and concrete,” Zhu said through a translator. “There was a lot of construction waste and a lot of materials: crushed stone, sand, etc. I was just thinking of how to reutilize these things.”

Innovation would come from Zhu’s epiphany, and it manifested itself in the fly-ash bricks.

The bricks are said to contain at least 30 percent reclaimed material, instead of traditional cement, which reduces costs and energy input in the manufacturing process, Zhu said.

“Once we bake the bricks, we need steam, and either we use coal or diesel,” Zhu said. “Fly-ash bricks are eco-friendly bricks because it’s using the fly ash, which is the residuals from burning coal.

“Developers tend to buy ecofriendly products, so there’s a general trend,” Zhu said. “This business doesn’t have any bottleneck in terms of environmental policy, so basically the government has encouraged us.”

Yulong’s CFO Sam Wu told China Daily in March that the company initially filed for its IPO back in May 2014.

In May, Baozun Inc, China’s leading e-commerce solutions provider whose top shareholder is Alibaba, raised $110 million in an IPO at Nasdaq. Wowo Ltd, a Beijing-based e-commerce firm, brought a $40 million IPO to Nasdaq in April.

“The reason we chose a US market is because it increases the company’s whole image,” Zhu said. “The setting also gives companies an opportunity to learn more about an international way of operating.”

Zhu said the company is “building up” its business model with the goal of expanding the recycling technology to other cities already using the production model as a prototype.

“The provincial level government in Henan thinks this is a very important project,” he said. “It is a problem in every city in China, so there’s going to be a very huge market for us to grow.”