Nio, an electrical car upstart from China, is planning to checklist its shares in Singapore, which is able to make the city-state the third base the place it trades as geopolitical tensions between China and the US heighten.
Nio said on Friday that it’s looking for a secondary itemizing of its Class A atypical shares “by the use of introduction” on the Singapore Trade Securities Buying and selling Restricted, a strategy to checklist securities already in situation on one other trade.
The corporate’s shares will proceed to be primarily listed and traded on the New York Inventory Trade, the place it debuted again in 2018. Earlier this 12 months, Nio accomplished a secondary listing in Hong Kong.
The announcement got here after the US Securities Trade Fee added over 80 corporations to a list of principally Chinese language corporations going through expulsion from US exchanges, which incorporates Nio and different tech behemoths like microblogging platform Weibo, video streaming web site Bilibili, e-commerce platforms JD.com and Pinduoduo, Tencent Music Leisure (Tencent’s music streaming empire), and gaming firm NetEase.
Li Auto and Xpeng, that are Nio’s rivals in China, are additionally on the checklist.
The delisting watchlist represents a longtime standoff between accounting authorities in China and the US. In 2020, the Trump administration handed a invoice demanding extra visibility into the books of US-listed international companies, zeroing in on the auditing practices of Chinese language entities. However the coverage has not sat effectively with international locations reluctant to show over the information of their homegrown companies, fearing nationwide safety dangers.
A handful of Chinese language tech corporations have acted preemptively by pursuing secondary listings effectively earlier than they had been placed on the watchlist. The Hong Kong Inventory Trade noticed a wave of “homecoming listings” by giants like Alibaba, JD.com and NetEase, which might assist them appeal to buyers at dwelling who’re extra conversant in their companies whereas hedging in opposition to the chance of being kicked off US bourses.
