China Halts Ant Group's Blockbuster IPO

In a late-evening announcement that stunned China, the Shanghai Stock Exchange slammed the brakes on Ant's initial public offering, which was set to be the biggest stock debut in history with investors on multiple continents and at least $34 billion in proceeds. The New York Times reports: The stock exchange's notice to Ant said that the company's proposed offering might no longer meet the requirements for listing after Chinese regulators had summoned company executives, including Jack Ma, the co-founder of the e-commerce titan Alibaba and Ant's controlling shareholder, for a meeting on Monday. Neither the regulators nor Ant has said in detail what was discussed at the meeting. But the timing of the conversation, mere days before Ant's shares were expected to begin trading concurrently in Shanghai and Hong Kong, suggested discord with the company or with Mr. Ma, who spun Ant out of Alibaba in 2011.

Though he is not part of Ant's management, Mr. Ma has been a spirited champion for the company's mission of bringing financial services to small businesses and others in China who he says have been ill served by stodgy, government-run institutions. Shortly after the Shanghai exchange's announcement, Ant said it was suspending the Hong Kong leg of its listing as well. The company apologized to investors "for any inconvenience." "We will keep in close communications with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and relevant regulators," the company said, "and wait for their further notice with respect to further developments of our offering and listing process."

Ever Hear Jack Ma Speak?

[Thelasko]

I saw part of a presentation from Jack Ma on YouTube a while back. It was an endless string of catchphrases and buzzwords, and otherwise incomprehensible. Anybody see something with substance from him?

Re:

[bogaboga]

...It was an endless string of catchphrases and buzzwords, and otherwise incomprehensible...

[...bold mine...]

A statement like this in many cases gives away a submitter's lack of exposure. It is usually made by folks that are crass, or otherwise unrefined.

I mean, Jack Ma has been very very very successful - then you hear this dude say statements like this. Sad, is all I can say.

Re:

[thegreatbob]

If we progressively extend our goal-oriented bandwidth while dynamically reconceptualizing our integrated, interactive benefits and best practices, we might see a future in which we can incentivize our scalable, seamless testing procedures to achieve total linkage for our users! That being said, we must take every pain to exploit the holistic, impactful value of our intuitive, just in time clouds, if we have any intention of revolutionizing our hyperscale e-commerce collaboration and idea-sharing. Further,

Re:

[thegreatbob]

Apparently a (very, very forced) portmanteau of productive + procrastinating ... procrastinating in some way, by being productive at some other task. Doesn't seem to have any data on Google Trends, but has a few search results dating it to 2016 onwards (and an apparently bad OCR in a PDF from 2005)

Re:

[thegreatbob]

Also seems like 'productinate' is similar in its prevalence.

Re: Ever Hear Jack Ma Speak?

[anonimouser]

Yes, listened to interview with Elon Musk about AI. Liked him a lot more than Musk.

Re:

[Thelasko]

Yes, listened to interview with Elon Musk about AI. Liked him a lot more than Musk.

That's the one! I found Jack Ma much more personable than Musk, but I thought his statements lacked substance. Where Musk is very much in his own head, but his content is deep, and insightful.

Maven

[backslashdot]

Maven is much better than Ant, heck I'd even go with Gradle over Ant.

Add more kickback

[martinX]

Insufficient kickback for those in power. Add more kickback and the problem will go away.

Re:

[guygo]

Yes, I think you've hit it spot on. If the past is predicate, Beijing is pushing for a bigger cut off the top in exchange for "more favorable" business conditions.

But he's got

[bobstreo]

"...But he's got high hopes, he's got high hopes
He's got high apple pie, in the sky hopes

So any time you're gettin' low
'stead of lettin' go
Just remember that ant..."

The ANT ipo is on hold because

[oldgraybeard]

China's CCP leadership is not sure they need to pay the Biden's off yet.

One thing for sure

[PPH]

Somebody's picnic was spoiled.

Incredibly oversubscribed

[Camembert]

I currently live in HK. I was actually interested in investing in the IPO. But interest has been so sky high it has been incredibly oversubscribed, like 300+ times. To have a chance of getting a good number of shares, many people have borrowed money. That would probably have been a good approach had the IPO happened, but now these borrowers need to pay interest and they still don’t have shares.