Shanda plans NASDAQ listing
By Liu Baijia (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-05-14 08:55

China's biggest online games operator Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited said it expects to issue 13.8 million American depository shares (ADSs) at US$11 per share on the NASDAQ in New York yesterday (US Eastern Time), despite worries about the bad condition of the market.

The Chinese company will raise US$143 million from the initial public offering (IPO), with 9.6 million ADSs being offered by Shanda and 4.2 million by shareholders, mainly a venture capital arm of Japan's Soft Bank.

Goldman Sachs (Asia) LLC is the Shanda's IPO's global co-ordinator and sole book runner and Bear Stearns, CLSA/CIBC World Markets, HSBC Holdings Plc and Piper Jaffray will help sell the shares.

Shanda and the selling shareholders also granted the underwriters an option to purchase up to an additional 2.1 million ADSs.

Shanda recorded a revenue of US$72.5 million in 2003, a year-on-year increase of 84 per cent, with its profits almost doubling to US$33 million.

But the IPO is at a difficult time for China's concept Internet companies.

The stock prices of five NASDAQ-listed Chinese Internet companies, bright stars in the market over the past year, fell by a great deal over the past three months, with Sohu.com Inc shares even dropping by about 40 per cent.

The situation has led to the delay in the IPO of Beijing-based wireless service provider Mtone, which already made an IPO filing to the NASDAQ, but it has not yet decided on the pricing and the IPO date.

Shanda, which was scheduled to price its shares on Wednesday and start trading yesterday, had to postpone those moves for another day.

It also had to cut its pricing from a range of US$13-15 to US$11.

Michael Yin, a senior Internet analyst with Shanghai iResearch Ltd, believed the falls were mainly due to US investors' panic over the overheating of some parts of the Chinese economy.

The decline in wireless revenues for companies like Sohu.com Inc and Netease.com Inc increased investors' worries about these companies' prospects.

But the Internet sector should be seen in a different light from other overheating sectors such as steel, real estate and cement, said Yin.

"It is a different story, if you see the fact that there are fewer than 80 million Internet users among the 1.3 billion population," said Yin.

"It is not a case of overheating, but a growing business."

Yin said that the company, which is in a dispute with South Korean companies over its most popular game Mir, also had to move faster to develop new games and attract Mir players to the new games to reduce the dispute's impact.

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