Fintech giant Ant Group Co.’s valuation was trimmed again by global investors who bought private shares ahead of its suspended initial public offering.
Boston-based Fidelity Investments cut its estimate for Ant to US$70 billion ($96.30 billion) at the end of May, according to Bloomberg calculations based on filings. That’s down from US$78 billion in June last year, and US$235 billion just before Ant’s IPO was torpedoed by regulators in November 2020.
BlackRock Inc. lowered the value to US$151 billion as of March from US$174 billion, while T. Rowe Price Group Inc. trimmed it to US$112 billion as of May, compared with US$189 billion last year.
The woes for Ant and its investors are adding up. The company’s profit fell 17% for the March quarter amid an ongoing year-long regulatory overhaul. The US$150 billion price tag marks an important threshold since investors including Warburg Pincus, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Silver Lake and Temasek Holdings Pte were said to have invested in Ant at that price four years ago.
*figures are in USD
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Ant declined to comment in an emailed statement. BlackRock and T. Rowe Price also declined to comment. Fidelity and Ballie Gifford & Co. didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Hangzhou-based firm has been restructuring its operations to meet a list of demands from Chinese regulators over the past year, including beefing up capital, curbing consumer lending, and shuffling its management. Billionaire Jack Ma is considering ceding his control of 50.52% voting rights in the firm, people familiar have said.
In a filing in July, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reiterated that Ma “intends to reduce and thereafter limit his direct and indirect economic interest in Ant Group over time” to a percentage that does not exceed 8.8%.
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China’s campaign to rein in its tech businesses kicked off with snuffing out Ant’s planned US$35 billion initial public offering. The crackdown snowballed into an assault on every corner of China’s technosphere as Beijing seeks to end the domination of a few heavyweights and create a more equitable distribution of wealth.
As part of the government-ordered restructuring, Ant has ramped up its capital base to 35 billion yuan ($7.11 billion). It’s building firewalls in an ecosystem that once allowed it to direct traffic from Alipay, with a billion users, to services like wealth management, consumer lending and delivery services.
Consumer loans jointly made with banks have been split from Ant’s Jiebei and Huabei brands. Assets under management at its proprietary money-market fund Yu’ebao -- once the world’s largest -- dropped about 35% from a peak in March 2020 to 813 billion yuan as of June.
Alibaba removed Ant executives from its important partnership committee, a group of people who can nominate the majority of the board.
Ant has yet to apply for a financial holding company license to be regulated like a bank -- a major move widely seen as an indication on whether it has satisfied Beijing’s requirements and that may set the stage for a resumption of its share sale.
