EXCLUSIVE Chinese fashion retailer SHEIN revives plans for a New York listing in 2022-source

A keyboard and a shopping cart are seen in front of the Shein logo shown in this illustration image taken October 13, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE, Jan 25 (Reuters) – Chinese fashion retailer SHEIN is reviving plans to be listed in New York this year and its founder is considering a citizenship change to ignore proposed stricter rules for offshore IPOs in China, two people familiar with the problem. said.

It wasn’t immediately clear how much the company wanted to collect from its New York debut.

The initial public offering (IPO), if completed, would be the first major equity deal by a Chinese company in the United States since regulators in the world’s second-largest economy stepped in to tighten oversight of the listing in July.

SHEIN, founded by Chinese entrepreneur Chris Xu in 2008, first started preparing for a US IPO about two years ago, but scrapped those plans partly because of the unpredictable market amid rising US-China tensions, the sources said.

Both sources declined to be named because the plans are confidential. A SHEIN spokesman said the company had no plans to go public.

The Nanjing-based company is one of the world’s largest online fashion marketplaces targeting overseas consumers. The United States is its largest market.

The source said SHEIN founder Xu is eyeing Singaporean citizenship in part to bypass China’s new and stricter rules on listing overseas. The citizenship change, if implemented and successful, would ease the path to an offshore IPO, they said.

Neither Xu nor any other SHEIN executives applied for Singaporean citizenship, a company spokesman said, without elaborating. Xu did not respond to a Reuters question sent through this spokesperson.

New rules issued by China’s cyber administration and an offshore filing filing regime to be finalized by China’s securities regulator are set to make the US listing process for Chinese companies more complicated, if not longer.

The securities regulator’s draft regulation for offshore listings targets companies where the majority of senior management is a Chinese citizen or resides in China, or whose primary business activity is conducted in China.

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SHEIN ships to 150 countries and territories from its many global warehouses, according to its website.

It generated about 100 billion yuan ($15.7 billion) in revenue in 2021, taking advantage of the pandemic shifting global consumption online, one of the sources and another person familiar with the matter said. The valuation is around $50 billion in early 2021, they said.

Valuations are expected to double in the last year, one of the first two sources said.

The company, whose investors include Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital and Tiger Global, was valued at $15 billion in its last funding round in August 2020, according to CB Insights data.

According to Coresight Research, SHEIN’s forecast sales in 2020 jumped 250% over the previous year to $10 billion, with more than 2,000 items added on its website each week.

A SHEIN spokesman said as a private company it did not disclose financial figures.

SHEIN has hired Bank of America (BAC.N), Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and JPMorgan (JPM.N) to work on the IPO, said sources familiar with the company’s assessment, and others with knowledge of the matter.

Reporting by Kane Wu and Scott Murdoch in Hong Kong, and Fanny Potkin in Singapore; Additional reporting by Sophie Yu in Beijing; Edited by Sumeet Chatterjee and Stephen Coates

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