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Ant Group stands as the financial affiliate of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant. Recently, the tech group has filed an Initial Public Offering (IPO) in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. While this is all well and good, it could stand as being the largest IPO in history.
Aiming To Overtake Saudi Aramco In Largest IPO
Ant Group was created by Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba. As it stands now, the Group is aiming for a valuation of $226 billion for the company. This can be gleaned from its target IPO, which aims to raise almost $30 billion in funding, which was reported by Bloomberg, citing sources close to the matter at hand on the 25th of August.
This IPO stands as possibly the largest of its kind in history, potentially overtaking Saudi Aramco, the multinational gas and oil giant based in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Aramco managed to raise $29.4 billion this year. As Bloomberg’s data show, should this target valuation be matched, it would stand equal to the market capitalization of Bank of America, the US banking giant. The valuation would be twice the value of the entire Citigroup, as well.
Massive Interest Already
Bloomberg made it clear that the Hong Kong offering of Ant Group would be led by heavyweight institutions such as Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, China International Capital Corp, and Citigroup. The IPO’s Shanghai counterpart will be led by local major investment banking firms, such as CSC Financial and China International Capital Corporation. Ant Group itself has speculated that in Shanghai alone, it’ll gain around 48 billion Yuan, which is valued at around $7 billion in total.
With the proceeds gained from the IPO, it’s reported that Ant Group is making plans to expand its cross-border payments, all the while giving its research and development capabilities a healthy boost.
Continued Innovation Into Blockchain
As Ant Group plans on possibly creating the largest IPO in history, it has already launched a new platform on its blockchain business, AntChain. This stands as one of many projects Ant Group has been doing through the use of blockchain technology since it started with the nascent technology back in 2015. Ever since, Ant Group has been hard at work, pairing it up with innovations like AI and the Internet of Things.
AntChain’s latest platform caters to copyrighting, allowing for AI and blockchain technology to work in tandem to secure copyright certificates for anything uploaded to it. It was developed in such a way that it can even be used within the Courts regarding copyright infringement cases.
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