Online fashion retailer Shein's potential mega stock listing in London could be just the news the city has been waiting so long to hear. The company is set to file for an initial public offering in London as soon as this week, Bloomberg News reported. The timing could change, and there's no certainty a deal will result, said a person who asked not to be identified because the plan is confidential.
If the listing goes ahead as envisaged, with an estimated valuation of $64 billion, it would be big enough to quiet the doomsday chatter around the U.K.'s initial public offering market for a while.
Even just a 10% slice of the company would make it London's largest first-time share sale since Glencore Plc raised almost $10 billion in 2011. With the city's share of IPOs in Europe dwindling to the lowest in decades and the country losing its crown as Europe's largest equity market by valuation, good news about Shein would be a big boost to the London Stock Exchange. The bourse has suffered the blow of several companies choosing to move their primary listings to New York.
In a painful snub, homegrown Arm Holdings Plc opted to go public in the United States. "Clearly, London will want the IPO to be a success to help rebuild its reputation as a listing venue," after being starved of major listings in recent years, said Russ Mould, an investment director at AJ Bell. It's still early to determine just how welcoming U.
K. investors will be for Shein, after its original proposal to list in N.
