Shares in Kuaishou nearly tripled on their first day of trading in Hong Kong, delivering a massive windfall for the Chinese streaming video platform and chief rival to TikTok.
The company’s stock opened 194 per cent higher in early trading on Friday at HK$338 (US$43.60), up from the initial public offering price of HK$115.
That brought the company’s market capitalisation to almost $180bn.
Kuaishou, which raised about $5.4bn in its IPO, competes in China with ByteDance, the owner of TikTok and its Chinese sister app Douyin. ByteDance is also considering a listing this year for some of its businesses, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.
More than 262m Chinese users check the Kuaishou app an average of 10 times per day, spending an average of 86 minutes watching videos and chatting with the creators who make them.
These interactions produce the app’s main revenue stream, as Kuaishou takes a cut of the tips viewers shower on content creators. These include small virtual gifts such as stickers, ranging from ones depicting beer for Rmb1.5 (US$0.23) each to ones of golden dragons that cost Rmb1,400. Such tips contributed 62 per cent of Kuaishou’s revenue in the nine months to September 30 last year.
Total revenue in the period rose 49 per cent from a year earlier to Rmb41bn.
