Ant Group to pull off the biggest IPO ever

Jack Ma’s Ant Group dominates the Chinese payments market through its Alipay app

Billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group is poised to pull off what could be the biggest initial public offering ever by simultaneously listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai. It’s said to be gunning for a valuation of £168.93 billion ($225 billion), making it the world’s fourth-largest financial company.

A 2011 offshoot of Chinese giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., the firm has defined and dominates the Chinese payments market through its ubiquitous Alipay app. It also runs the giant Yu’ebao money market fund and the Huabei and Jiebei consumer lending units.

Based in Hangzhou, a sprawling metropolis south of Shanghai, its ambitions run much deeper than just finance.

Alipay: A £12.76 Trillion ($17 Trillion) Machine

The world’s largest digital payment platform was created in 2004 as an escrow service for Alibaba to secure transactions on the e-commerce site. For consumer wary about online payments, the service was a hit and quickly spread to other platforms.

The mobile version, launched in 2009, once held 75% of the market, but has seen its share slide to about 55% in competition with Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay.

Alipay has 711 million active users, mostly in China, who tap it to buy everything from a quick coffee to even property, generating £12.76 trillion ($17 trillion) in payments in the 12 months through June. But it’s also becoming less and less important to Ant and contributed 36% of its revenue in the first half of this year, down from more than 50% just two years ago.

Losing ground in the payments market was one reason that Ant called off a previous plan for an IPO already in 2017, people familiar said at the time. It’s now a much more diversified company.

Huabei and Jiebei:

For those that don’t have ready cash to spend via Alipay, Ant operates services that dole out small unsecured loans: Huabei (Just Spend) and Jiebei (Just Lend). The former focuses on quick consumer loans for purchases of iPhones and fridges, while the latter finances anything from travel to education.

Ant uses some of its capital for these loans, but the bulk of the money comes from banks, with the firm acting as gateway. The platforms made loans to about 500 million people in the 12 months through June, charging annualized rates on its smaller loans of about 15%. Their lending could swell to almost 2 trillion yuan by 2021, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The firm’s CreditTech business, which includes Huabei and Jiebei, is its single biggest revenue maker, contributing 39% of the total in the first six months of the year.

The company is now applying for a license to set up a consumer finance company. The new entity would boost Ant’s lending capacity since consumer finance companies are allowed to lend out 10 times their capital, far surpassing the two to three times leverage of Ant’s existing micro-loan companies.