Headquarters of Ant Group (previously called Ant Financial) in Hangzhou, May 2018. Credit: Imaginechina via AP Images
When Ant Group, the Chinese fintech giant, goes public later this year, it’s expected to raise $30 billion to become the largest initial public offering in history. That means its stakeholders stand to make a whole lot of money.
One of those stakeholders, indirectly at least, is the Chinese government.
The state owns about eight percent of the Ant Group, spread across several government firms and a fund operated by the central government, according to WireScreen, the data arm of The Wire that maps China’s business landscape. For an IPO that will likely exceed Saudi Aramco’s record-breaking turn of $29.4 billion last year, the Chinese government is sure to profit handsomely.
But while owning a little slice of the Ant pie is good for the Chinese government, it’s a little more complicated for the Ant Group, which spun out of e-commerce giant Alibaba in 2011 to become its own company. The company, formerly known as Alipay, was renamed Ant in 2014.
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