Alibaba Pursues Primary Listing on Hong Kong Stock Exchange

Alibaba Group announced on July 26 that its board of directors has authorized the company’s management to apply for a primary listing on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEx). Alibaba currently maintains a secondary listing on the HKEx Main Board, and will now apply for primary listing status pursuant to the exchange’s rules and regulations.

According to the announcement, after completion of the primary listing process, which is expected to occur prior to the end of 2022, Alibaba will become a dual-primary listed company on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American Depositary Shares (ADSs) and on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the form of ordinary shares.

Since the company’s secondary listing in Hong Kong in November 2019, there has been a significant increase in its public circulation and transaction volume. In the first six months ended June 30, 2022, Alibaba’s average daily trading volume in Hong Kong was approximately $700 million, compared to average daily trading volume of approximately $3.2 billion in the United States.

Given the substantial presence of its business operations in Greater China, the company expects that a dual-primary listing status would allow it to broaden its investor base and facilitate incremental liquidity, and in particular to expand access to China and other Asia-based investors.

“We have further clarified our commitment to the three major strategies – consumption, cloud computing, and globalization – at the beginning of this year,” said Alibaba‘s Chairman and CEO Daniel Zhang.

During this past fiscal year, Alibaba achieved its stated goal of serving more than 1 billion annual active consumers in China. Alibaba Cloud realized full-year profitability for the first time since its establishment 13 years ago. The direction of globalization is based on exploring consumption sector opportunities and cloud computing.

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According to Alibaba‘s financial report, the tech giant has 29 partners. Eric Jing, Ant Group’s chairman and chief executive, CTO Ni Xingjun, Chief People Officer Zeng Songbai, and four others were no longer Alibaba partners as of May 31. According to Wall Street Journal‘s report, Ant Group said the changes are part of its continuous efforts to enhance corporate governance.

In addition, Alibaba will report its unaudited financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, before the US market opens on August 4.