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Clifford Chance advises on China Literature's US$1.1 billion IPO

8 November 2017

Clifford Chance advises on China Literature's US$1.1 billion IPO

Leading international law firm Clifford Chance advised the joint sponsors and underwriters including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse on China Literature's US$1.1 billion (HK$8.3 billion) initial public offering on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The deal received exceptionally strong demand in all three tranches of the offering. The retail tranche was more than 625 times oversubscribed attracting over 400,000 applications and application monies of over US$66 billion (HK$520 billion), making it the second most oversubscribed deal in Hong Kong. Both the preferential offering for existing Tencent shareholders and the international offering for institutional investors were also significantly oversubscribed.

China Literature, a unit of Tencent Holdings, is an online literature platform in China which as of 30 June 2017, had 6.4 million writers and 9.6 million literary works.

Partner Amy Lo said, "We were very excited to assist on this landmark offering in the technology space by China Literature; another high profile IPO which will be known as one of the most oversubscribed deals ever in Hong Kong. Our team expects to see an increasing number of technology-related issuers in the coming months."

The deal was co-led by partners Amy Lo, Tim Wang and Fang Liu who were supported by consultant Christine Xu, senior associate Lawrence Zhang, associates Queenie Tong, James Zhang and Samson Chan, and trainee Alex Feng.

Other IPOs the team has advised on recently include the US$110.5 million IPO and listing on The NASDAQ Global Market of American depositary shares of Secoo, Asia's largest online integrated upscale products and services platform; BOCOM International's US$230 million IPO; and Guotai Junan Securities' IPO for US$2.1 billion.