Busiest summer for Asia IPOs on record with $56b in deals
Many more listings are lined up for the final quarter
Asia has had its best third quarter on record for initial public offerings, even with Hong Kong turning quiet as many firms put listing plans in the regional powerhouse on hold amid China’s sweeping regulatory clampdown.
Thanks to blockbuster deals in markets like South Korea and India, first-time share sales in the region raised $56 billion in the three months through Sept. 30, the most ever for such a period, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
“Activity will continue — 2021 remains an extraordinary year for equity capital markets volume,” said William Smiley, co-head of Asia ex-Japan equity capital markets at Goldman Sachs. “Global investors still
want access to Asian growth.”
Hong Kong slowdown
Asia’s record third quarter came despite the slowdown in Hong Kong, one of the world’s busiest listing venues. As Beijing broadened its efforts to rein in corporates and align business models with President Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign, about $1 trillion was wiped off the value of Chinese stocks globally in July and Hong Kong’s stock benchmark sank into a bear market in August.
That saw listing volumes in the financial hub dip to $6 billion in the third quarter, trailing Korea for the first time in four years.
It was also the lowest quarterly IPO haul for Hong Kong since the start of 2020, when the pandemic was taking hold and equity capital markets ground to a halt.
IPOs by the likes of game developer Krafton Inc. and onlineonly bank KakaoBank Corp. pushed third-quarter volumes to $10.4 billion in Korea, around four times what was fetched in each of the previous two quarters.
India listings
Similarly, in India, food-delivery startup Zomato Ltd. raised $1.3 billion in July. Many more listings are lined up for the final quarter, starting with digital payments company Paytm, which has filed to raise as much as Rs166 billion ($2.2 billion) in what would be the nation’s biggest IPO ever.
“India now has a savvy, techeducated population with good internet penetration,” said Anvita Arora, co-head of Asia Pacific equity capital markets at Bank of America Corp.