IPO-hungry tech firms might jump the queue in China - Paul Gillis

Paul Gillis

Financial authorities in Beijing are playing with the idea to give tech firms a faster-track IPO in China, says accounting professor Paul Gillis at his weblog. Taking away some of the cumbersome restrictions for IPO's in China might lead to the expected abolishment of variable interest entity or VIE's, a side-track allowing Chinese firms to list in the US, he suggests.

Paul Gillis:

Chinese tech companies often also faced restrictions against foreign ownership. That should have blocked foreign venture capital investments and foreign IPOs, but a workaround was developed. The workaround was the variable interest entity (VIE), which enabled the listing of companies controlled through contracts instead of ownership. VIEs have been a source of pain for many investors, since the contracts proved difficult to enforce and control through contracts proved to be vastly inferior to control through actual ownership. 

A few formerly US listed companies have succeeded in relisting in China. Before doing so they needed to restructure to get rid of the VIE structures and offshore structures (and control features) that had been put in place for the US listings. 

The Reuter’s article points to three companies that may be the initial beneficiaries of the queue-jumping initiative - Ant Financial, the world's most valuable financial technology company, Zhong An Online Property and Casualty Insurance, and security software maker Qihoo 360 Technology Co.  Ant and Zhong An would be doing IPOs, while Qihoo went private in 2016 and would be relisting in China. 

It is not known whether China plans to change its rules to facilitate control structures. Ant is owned by Jack Ma and his associates. Jack Ma insisted on a control structure for Alibaba. It would also appear that it will be difficult for foreign investors to participate in these transactions, since foreigners can only purchase shares on the Chinese exchanges through the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) programs or the Hong Kong Connects. 

I have been hearing rumors that China soon plans to announce that the VIE structure will no longer be tolerated for foreign investment, while at the same time grandfathering existing VIE structures. China had earlier proposed to change the foreign investment rules to exclude companies that were controlled by Chinese from restrictions, effectively encouraging the control structures, but these rules were not adopted when the foreign investment rules were modified last year. 

If VIEs are banned (and the rules are actually enforced), it would likely mean the end of new US listings of Chinese tech (and other restricted sectors such as education and finance) companies. The queue-jumping program might foreshadow that announcement.  The big losers would appear to be US venture capital firms and US investment banks.

More at Paul Gillis' weblog.
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