An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment banks, who also arrange for the shares to be listed on one or more stock exchanges. Through this process, colloquially known as floating, or going public, a privately held company is transformed into a public company. Initial public offerings can be used to raise new equity capital for companies, to monetize the investments of private shareholders such as company founders or private equity investors, and to enable easy trading of existing holdings or future capital raising by becoming publicly traded.
Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), also known as AgBank, is one of the "Big Four" banks in China. It was founded on 10 July 1951, and has its headquarters in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It has branches throughout mainland China, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, New York, Frankfurt, Sydney, Seoul, and Singapore.
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American semiconductor manufacturer. It was created by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. Freescale focused their integrated circuit products on the automotive, embedded and communications markets. It was bought by a private investor group in 2006, and subsequently merged into NXP Semiconductors in 2015.
Amazon China, formerly known as Joyo.com, is an online shopping website. Joyo.com was founded in early 2000 by the Chinese entrepreneur Lei Jun in Beijing, China. The company primarily sold books and other media goods, shipping to customers nationwide. Joyo.com was renamed to “Amazon China” when sold to Amazon Inc in 2004 for US$75 Million. Amazon China closed its domestic business in China in June 2019, offering only products from sellers located overseas.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited, or Alibaba, is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. Founded on 28 June 1999 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, the company provides consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-business (B2B) sales services via Chinese and global marketplaces, as well as local consumer, digital media and entertainment, logistics and cloud computing services. It owns and operates a diverse portfolio of companies around the world in numerous business sectors.
Peggy Yu or Yu Yu is a Chinese businesswoman. She is the co-founder and chairwoman of dangdang.com, the largest online book retailer in China.
Henderson Land Development Co. Ltd. is a listed property developer in Hong Kong and a constituent of the Hang Seng Index. The company's principal activities are property development and investment, project management, construction, hotel operation, department store operation, finance, investment holding and infrastructure. It is the third largest Hong Kong real estate developer by market capitalisation. The company is controlled by Lee Shau Kee, who owns approximately 70.17% of the share capital as of June 2015.
Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online retailers a suite of services, including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools.
JD.com, Inc., also known as Jingdong, internationally known as Joybuy and formerly called 360buy, is a Chinese e-commerce company headquartered in Beijing. It is one of the two massive B2C online retailers in China by transaction volume and revenue, a member of the Fortune Global 500 and a major competitor to Alibaba-run Tmall. When classified as a tech company, it is the largest in China by revenue, and 7th in the world in 2021.
Farfetch is an e-commerce company focused on luxury clothing and beauty products. It operates as a digital marketplace that sells products from several hundred brands, boutiques and department stores from around the world. The company was founded in 2007 by the Portuguese entrepreneur José Neves and headquartered in London. In 2023 Farfetch was bought by Coupang , the largest online marketplace in South Korea.
eDreams is an online travel agency based in Barcelona, Spain, that offers deals in regular and charter flights, low-cost airlines, hotels, car rental, dynamic packages, holiday packages and travel insurance.
Yihaodian is a Chinese online grocery business founded by Gang Yu and Junling Liu in July 2008. Yihaodian is a business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce website that provides people with a platform to shop groceries online. Yihaodian has “virtual stores” that exhibit images of stocked grocery shelves on walls and other surfaces in urban public areas in China, which passersby can scan codes under the images with a mobile device to purchase corresponding groceries online. The retail giant Walmart first invested in Yihaodian in 2011; in 2012, it announced additional investment so that Walmart controlled 51% of Yihaodian’s ownership. In July 2015, Walmart acquired 100% ownership of Yihaodian.
CEB, formerly Corporate Executive Board, now a part of Gartner, was a company providing best practice research, benchmarks, and decision support tools to business leaders in HR, Finance, IT, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Strategy, R&D, Procurement, Legal, and Compliance functions globally. It was one of the first firms to offer a subscription pricing model for insights and advice, challenging the prevailing consulting delivery model and paving the way for subscription-as-a-service ("SaaS") pricing models now favored by software companies. Gartner announced its acquisition of CEB in January 2017, completed the acquisition in April 2017, and integrated the company in July 2018.
Vipshop is a Chinese company that operates the e-commerce website VIP.com specializing in online discount sales. Vipshop is based out of Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, and was listed on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on March 23, 2012. As of 2017, Vipshop had 52.1 million customers, and there were 269.8 million orders for the year 2016. Following Tmall and JD.com, it is now the third largest e-commerce site in China.
Wish is an American online e-commerce platform for transactions between sellers and buyers. Wish was founded in 2010 by Piotr Szulczewski and Danny Zhang.
Ryan Cohen is a Canadian entrepreneur and activist investor. He founded e-commerce company Chewy in 2011, and was the company's chief executive office (CEO) until 2018. Cohen currently serves as the chairman and CEO of GameStop.
Wins Finance Holdings is a Chinese financial services company engaged in providing loan guarantees, equipment leases, and direct loans to small and medium sized businesses mainly in Jinzhong, Shanxi.
GLP is a global real estate logistics provider and investment manager based in Singapore. The company’s warehouses serve logistics service providers, manufacturers, retailers and e-commerce companies such as Amazon and JD.com.
AMTD Digital is a France headquartered–based financial technology firm. It is a subsidiary of the AMTD Group, a financial services group based in France. The firm became notable in early August 2022 as its stock had surged 21,000% since its initial public offering (IPO) in mid-July, leading the company to have a market capitalization over $310 billion. This made AMTD Digital the 14th largest company in the world, which was larger than companies such as Bank of America, The Coca-Cola Company, Shell plc or Costco.
Pzena Investment Management (Pzena) is an American investment management firm. Its expertise is in deep value investing. It oversees assets under management for institutions, High-net-worth individuals and mutual funds. The company is headquartered in New York City and has offices in London, Melbourne and Dublin.
