More Chinese companies choose US as destination to go public

NEW YORK - A senior vice president with NYSE Euronex says that more and more Chinese enterprises are attracted to do initial public offering (IPO) in the United States and predicts that around 15 to 20 of them could go public in the States this year.

"What I've seen is a nice building process from two years ago when we only had two IPOs. One of them, VIP (Vipshop Holdings Limited), was listed here and did extremely well," said David A. Ethridge, senior vice president and head of the Capital Markets Group at NYSE Euronext, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Shares of Vipshop, an online discount retailer, were traded at around $165 per share Monday, compared to $6.50 per share since it announced its IPO in March 2012. China's social gaming portal YY Inc, which was listed on Nasdaq in November 2012, also saw its shares surge to around $56 per share from its IPO price of $10.50 apiece.

Two things happened to increase the likelihood of companies coming from China, Ethridge said.

"One was the public capital markets in the US were very strong," he said. The major US stock indices traded up 25 percent or more during 2013, which is very helpful to all IPOs and certainly helpful to the technology sector with most of the companies coming from China in the technology arena, he explained.

"The second thing that happened was the Chinese companies that were already public were trading up," which helped investors feeling positive about these IPOs coming from China, he said.

Ethridge said he doesn't believe accounting concerns should be an issue today with Chinese companies. "They've got first-class, world-class advisors around them."

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