After the long running, and some might say endless, will they/won’t they saga over the IPO for fast fashion retail giant Shein, London might beat New York at the last.
According to a weekend report from U.K. newspaper The Daily Mail’s This Is Money Shein could be about announce the London Stock Exchange (LSE) as the destination for its initial public offer (IPO) in a matter of days.
Directors from the Singapore-based fashion colossus are thought to be close to deciding on London over New York for the high profile listing.
Earlier last year the company had expanded its Singapore office after making a Singapore firm its de facto holding company, amid a flurry of filings by the online fast-fashion retailer, with additional reports that Shein’s founder and CEO, Chris Xu, had become a permanent resident of the city-state.
That was widely speculated to be to avoid growing regulator opposition for Chinese-based companies that wanted to float in the U.S.
Shein has previously de-registered its main business, Nanjing Top Plus Information Technology Co Ltd, according to Chinese corporate filings, and those developments were thought to bolster previous rumors that Shein was busying itself to list in New York.
However, in February last year Reuters reported that the company had shelved plans for its U.S. market listing amid ongoing rumors that it was readying itself for an IPO.
The Times also reported this weekend that London is the likely frontrunner for an IPO, with Shein aiming for a valuation of circa $88.5 billion, which would put it in the LSE’s top six companies by valuation.
Shein London IPO
The Shein board is understood to have concluded that the politicial climate means that a U.S. application may well be refused. Meantime, the U.K.’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, weighed in last month when he met Shein chairman Donald Tang in a bid to persuade him to commit to what – should it come to fruition – be one of London’s biggest corporate flotations.
It also comes at a time when the LSE has missed out on a number of high profile flotations and the rules have been tweaked twice in the past few years in a bid to help attract tech company flotations. These were part of wider reforms to keep London as a globally competitive financial centre after Brexit.
However, these reforms have yet to have encouraged an influx of fresh issues, with no IPOs completed in the fourth quarter of last year and 2024 scarcely busier.
For its part, after announcing its first design collaboration with Forever 21 late last year, Shein then upped its stakes in the U.K. market when it acquired the Missguided brand name from parent Frasers Group.
The acquisition came just over a year after British-based sportswear-to-fashion conglomerate Frasers Group rescued the business from administration in a $24 million deal.
Shein acquired Missguided’s intellectual property and trademarks, but not the real estate or Missguided’s employees, both of which were integrated into the wider Frasers’ fashion division.
Now the smart money is waiting on Shein’s final decision over where its IPO will be listed in what is likely to be a hugely over-subscribed public offer.
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