Asian and Middle East Sovereign Wealth Funds Look Forward to Ant Group’s Massive IPO

Posted on 08/25/2020

Chinese payment giant Ant Group Co., Ltd. (formerly known as Ant Financial) filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong and Shanghai. This could be the biggest IPO of all-time, supplanting Saudi Aramco’s famous offering. Ant Financial also decided to not list on Wall Street, amid increasing U.S.-China tensions. Ant Financial is backed by major heavyweights including Alibaba Group Holdings Limited, a slew of Chinese entities, as well as sovereign wealth funds and U.S. venture and PE firms like Silver Lake Partners, General Atlantic LLC, Carlyle Group, and Sequoia Capital. CPPIB, BlackRock, and Baillie Gifford are also investors.

Besides that Ant Financial received well over a billion of sovereign wealth fund capital in total. SWFI calculated that Asian sovereign wealth funds led the way in directly investing in Ant Financial, followed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Ant Financial essentially was the fintech arm of the Alibaba Group and started out as a digital payments platform – Alipay. Ant Financial has expanded to wealth management, insurance, and online lending.

In the first half of 2020, Ant Group demonstrated revenue of US$ 10.5 billion, according to the filing.

Correction: Ant Financial changed its name to Ant Group.

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