Czech Tycoon-led Home Credit Cancels $1.5b HK IPO

Home Credit NV, the consumer lender owned by Czech billionaire Petr Kellner, canceled a share offering in Hong Kong, where authorities are keen to demonstrate that street protests haven’t disrupted business.

The Amsterdam-registered Home Credit said Thursday “that due to market conditions, it has decided not to proceed with a global offering” on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company gave no more details.

Local and Chinese officials are trying to persuade the world that the city still gripped by unprecedented civil unrest has a future as a financial hub. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., China’s biggest e-commerce company, on Wednesday raised about $11 billion in a long-awaited stock sale, in what was seen as a move potentially gaining favor in Beijing.

Home Credit started gauging demand for its $1.5 billion share sale in September and was targeting a market capitalization of as much as 10 billion euros ($11 billion), according to people with knowledge of the matter.

But investors pushed back on that valuation — forcing the company to reassess its plans — seeing Home Credit as worth between 5 billion euros and 7.5 billion euros, the people said.

The lender is controlled by Kellner’s investment firm PPF Group NV. It had more than 47 billion euros of assets at the end of June.

Home Credit, founded in 1997, offers point-of-sale loans and other types of borrowing in nine countries across across Asia, central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, according to a preliminary prospectus in September. Its had 21.1 billion euros of outstanding gross loans at the end of June, with China accounting for 63% of the total.

Bloomberg