Founder and CEO Kate Wang speaking at a dinner to honor RELX employees in 2019. She worked at Bain & Company, Uber, and Didi Chuxing before branching out into the e-cigarette market. Credit: RELX
RELX Technology was founded in 2018 to tap into a smoking-hot business possibility in China: e-cigarettes. Last month, after becoming the most popular branded e-cigarette company in China in just three years, the company raised $1.4 billion in an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.
Shares of the company jumped 86 percent on the first day of trading, giving RELX a market capitalization of more than $38 billion and making it instantly one of the world's most valuable e-cigarette brands.
“China is the biggest tobacco market in the world, so it follows that it could be a very conducive environment for vaping products,” says Pieter Vorster, managing director of Idwala Research, an advisory firm focused on tobacco harm reduction. “It could be huge — that’s clearly what investors think.”
Investors seem to be discounting the risks associated with e-cigarettes, which have raised health and safety concerns in the U.S. and elsewhere. There are also r
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When Ken Wilcox, a former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank, moved to Shanghai in 2011, he was optimistic and eager to start up the bank's new joint venture in China. A decade later, however, he is extremely cynical about U.S. business interests in China. While analysts will, rightly, be debating SVB's missteps in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, Wilcox insists the bank's challenges in China should not be overlooked.
The former secretary of state talks about how the Trump administration changed U.S.-China relations; why he accused Beijing of genocide in Xinjiang; and why U.S. politicians should visit Taiwan.
