Q&A Community Zhihu Passes Hearing before IPO on HKEx

According to HKEx documents released on Friday, Chinese online Q&A platform Zhihu passed the required hearing before its IPO debut. The IPO underwriters will be Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase & Co, CICC and CMB International.

Zhihu, founded in 2011, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021. Now, however, Zhihu is seeking a secondary listing on the HKEx.

According to the prospectus, in Q4 2021, Zhihu‘s average monthly active users reached 99.6 million while the average monthly visitors reached 500 million and the average monthly user interactions reached 390 million times.

Zhihu‘s income in 2019, 2020 and 2021 was 670.5 million yuan ($105 million), 1.4 billion yuan and 3 billion yuan respectively, while net losses were 1 billion yuan, 517.6 million yuan and 1.3 billion yuan in the same periods. The company expects its total revenue in the first quarter of 2022 to be between 720 million yuan and 740 million yuan.

In 2021, the gross profit of Zhihu was 1,553.9 million yuan, compared with 757.8 million yuan in 2020. Its gross profit margin was 52.5%, compared with 56.0% in 2020.

In terms of cost, Zhihu‘s cost of revenue was 1.4054 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 136.44% year-on-year which the company says was due to an increase in costs for advertising, cloud services and bandwidth caused by the rapid growth of its user base.

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In addition, Zhihu disclosed its latest equity structure. Among them, founder Zhou Yuan holds 11.64%, Tencent holds 12.02%, Sinovation Ventures holds 9.65% and Qiming Venture Partners holds 8.27%.