ECM Weekly (9 March 2019) - Lyft, Shenwan Hongyuan, RHB Bank, Sea Ltd, Xinyi Solar, China Gas

It has been a fairly hectic week. We have been busy writing on upcoming IPOs, post-IPO events, and, to top it all off, there were four placements (Sea Ltd, RHB Bank, Xinyi Solar, and China Gas) this week.

Hong Kong's ECM activity seems to be picking up momentum. Starting off with approvals, Viva Biotech (1577881D HK) and Dongzheng Automotive Finance (2718 HK) filed their respective PHIP on HKEX. Ke Yan, CFA, FRM had previously written on Viva Biotech here while we are currently working on Dongzheng Automotive Finance (2718 HK) and also heard that Dongzheng Auto Finance had already kicked off pre-marketing on Monday.

For upcoming IPOs with completed bookbuilds, Yincheng International Holding (1902 HK) traded flat on debut (expected for a small and leveraged developer) while Zhejiang New Century Hotel Management Group (1158 HK), which had Ctrip and GreenTree as cornerstone investors, will list next Monday.

As for early coverage on IPOs, Sumeet Singh had already given a broad overview of ESR Cayman (ESR HK)'s business. He will be following up with more detailed analyses in the coming weeks.

In the US, Futu Holdings Ltd (FHL US) debuted well on Friday, trading up to as high as US$17 per share before closing just above US$15 but still well above the IPO price. We had been slightly more conservative because it is not exactly a very exciting company doing something groundbreaking but the management background in tech appears strong and there are no corporate governance issues.Sumeet Singh will update on trading liquidity and post-IPO analysis next week.

For pipeline IPOs, we heard that Ehang is planning its US IPO and it is looking to raise about US$500m. This is the Chinese drone manufacturer which made waves just over a year ago with a video of a team testing its autonomous aerial vehicle shown in the video below. Suffice to say, if and when the IPO launches, it will be interesting.

Ruhnn had also filed for IPO this week and we heard that pre-marketing will start next week while bookbuild will likely launch end of the month. This is an Alibaba-backed e-commerce influencer platform and we will be analyzing the company soon.

We had also been exploring potential trade ideas surrounding lock-up expiry such as Nio (蔚来) Lock-Up Expiry - Scattered Pre-IPO Investors to Be the Sellers and Meituan Dianping (美团点评): Thoughts Before Lock-Up Expiry. NIO's lock-up expiry had been an unfortunate case of poor outlook guidance in Q4 coinciding with lock-up expiry coming on the week after (11th March).