What’s new: SenseTime Group Inc., China’s largest artificial intelligence (AI) startup by revenue, plans to raise about HK$5.78 billion ($742.7 million) in its Hong Kong IPO on Friday, the company said in an exchange filing on Wednesday.
According to its prospectus, SenseTime had aimed to sell the 1.5 billion shares on offer for between HK$3.85 and HK$3.99 each. Its final offering price is at the very bottom of that range.
What’s the background: The news comes about two weeks after SenseTime decided to postpone its IPO plan after it ended up on a U.S. government blacklist that bars American investors from buying or selling its shares.
The company, which filed its IPO plan in late August, was originally set to go public on Dec. 17.
The Hong Kong-based AI startup has been involved in Sino-U.S. tensions since as early as October 2019, when it — along with 27 other Chinese enterprises and organizations — was added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List, which prevents the company from buying U.S.-made technologies on national security grounds.
SenseTime is the best performing company of China’s so-called “AI quartet” — which includes Megvii, CloudWalk Technology, and Yitu Internet Technology Co. Ltd. For the first six months of 2021, the company reported a net loss of 3.71 billion yuan ($579.4 million) on 1.65 billion yuan in revenue, according to its prospectus.
Contact reporter Manyun Zou (manyunzou@caixin.com) and editor Heather Mowbray (heathermowbray@caixin.com)
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