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FWD, the Asian insurer founded by the son of Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, has submitted an initial public offering in the United States in what would be one of the largest listings of the year.
The company launched by Richard Li in 2013 said Thursday that it had confidentially filed IPO applications to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This allows you to submit documents to the SEC before you publicly submit a brochure.
FWD said the number of U.S. depository shares to be offered and the IPO price range had not yet been determined and the timing of the listing was subject to regulatory approval. But according to people who know the situation, the company could get about $ 2 billion with the sale of shares.
FWD has aggressively expanded across Asia, rapidly developing a network in 10 countries, including Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia.
The insurer has nearly 10 million customers, more than $ 63 billion in assets and about 6,100 employees and 33,000 agents.
Richard Harris, a Hong Kong-based Port Shelter Investment Management fund manager, said FWD “has made huge profits [in market share] because it has a lot of firepower behind it ”.
As with Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong conglomerate, FWD “adopts a strategic vision of industries and invests heavily in them,” Harris said.
He added that it was “interesting” that the insurer had chosen the list in New York about Hong Kong, but American investors “will be interested [in FWD] and there seems to be a slight mismatch with the vision of Chinese companies, and that will be recognized in New York as a Chinese company. ”
He started FWD with the acquisition of $ 1.2 billion from ING insurance and pension companies in Thailand, Hong Kong and Macau. The expansion strategy of Huynh Thanh Phong, executive director of FWD, has focused on matching movements in new Asian markets with the use of technology to reduce documentation and complexity common to the region’s industry.
The group has swallowed competitors as rival financial groups have withdrawn from the region, including MetLife’s business in Hong Kong and the Thai insurance business Siam Commercial Bank, the industry’s largest acquisition in Southeast Asia.
“[SCB was] the asset of the prize that everyone wanted to go to ”, Phong he told the Financial Times in an interview this year. FWD eventually acquired SCB for about A $ 93 billion ($ 3 billion) in 2019, giving it a 36% market share in Thailand in terms of bancassurance, larger than the next three groups.
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