Asia Tech Wire (Mar 19) -- Chinese enterprise cloud service provider Qiniu Ltd. has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) with the Hong Kong stock exchange (HKEX) for the second time after a gap of nearly nine months.
Qiniu has hired Shenwan Hongyuan Securities (H.K.) Ltd., the Hong Kong arm of Chinese state-owned brokerage Shenwan Hongyuan, BOCOM International Holdings Co Ltd. (BOCOM International) and Huatai International Financial Holdings Co Ltd. (Huatai International) as joint sponsors for the Hong Kong IPO.
The filing shows that Qiniu holds a leading position in China's audiovisual cloud service market. Citing iResearch, Qiniu said it is the third-largest audiovisual platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider in China by revenue in 2023, with a market share of 5.8%.
Quiniu had more than 1.4 million registered users as of December 31, 2023, mostly developers or developer teams from various enterprises, the filing also disclosed.
It is worth noting that this is the third time that Qiniu has rushed for an IPO.
The company submitted a prospectus to the HKEX on June 29, 2023, with Shenwan Hongyuan Hong Kong and BOCOM International as its joint sponsors.
In addition to the two attempts to seek a listing in Hong Kong, Qiniu also publicly filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 30, 2021, in preparation for a listing on the Nasdaq under the symbol "QNIU".
However, Chinese ride-hailing giant DiDi Global made a low-profile listing on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2021, prompting Beijing to tighten regulation of Chinese companies' overseas listing applications.
In September 2022, Qiniu announced that it had withdrawn its application for listing in the U.S., and said that it would subsequently push forward with its IPO in due course in accordance with regulatory requirements and the capital market environment.
Ximalaya, Keep, Soul and other Chinese tech companies, like Qiniu, have canceled their U.S. IPO plans during this period, and sought to go public in Hong Kong instead.
Among them, fitness app Keep successfully went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange on July 12, 2023, raising HK$192 million.
