(Bloomberg) — The early clamor for listings on China’s new technology board intensifies this week as subscriptions for nine companies open Wednesday, testing investor appetite for stocks.
That’s the highest number for a single day in China since June 2015, as regulators speed up initial public offerings on the Nasdaq-style venue, which the government hopes will attract some of the country’s best companies. The first batch of 25 firms will begin trading on July 22, just eight months after President Xi Jinping first announced the project.
“The pace of issuance and the timetable of trading debuts on the tech board are faster than the market expected,” said Jiang Liangqing, a money manager at Ruisen Capital Management in Beijing. “Investor enthusiasm seems very strong for these new shares, but if the stock market keeps falling, investors will likely price in some negative sentiment on them.”
The Shanghai Composite Index was the worst-performing major equity gauge in the Asia-Pacific region Monday, falling the most in two months after the exchange gave fresh details on the new tech board late Friday. The coming rush of IPOs has raised concern that liquidity will be drained from other parts of the stock market, said Ken Chen, an analyst at KGI Securities Co. The tech-heavy ChiNext slid 2.7% Monday, its biggest loss since May 17.
Only five of the companies have opened for subscriptions so far, including Montage Technology Co. on Monday, leaving two weeks for the remaining 20. Based on their latest filings, the nine entering the fray Wednesday aim to raise a combined of 18.8 billion yuan ($2.7 billion). Among them, China Railway Signal & Communication Corp. plans to raise about 10.5 billion yuan, which would be the biggest listing of the year in China.
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Tianfeng Securities Co. expects the liquidity impact of the subscription process to be limited. The real test will come after the stocks start trading. The 25 companies are expected to account for around 7% of daily volume of the whole A-share market at first, a pattern that may last for five days as there’s no daily limit to price moves in that period, analysts including Liu Chenming wrote in a note dated Sunday. Other indexes have restrictions on stock moves.
The eight other companies lined up for Wednesday are Ningbo Ronbay New Energy Technology Co., Appotronics Corp., Fujian Forecam Optics Co., Harbin Xinguang Optic-Electronics Technology Co., Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc., Espressif Systems (Shanghai) Co., Anji Microelectronics Technology (Shanghai) Co. and Xi’an Bright Laser Technologies Co.
(Updates numbers in fifth paragraph.)
–With assistance from Irene Huang, Haoyang Li and Michelle Liu.
To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Ken Wang in Beijing at [email protected];Ludi Wang in Shanghai at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Sofia Horta e Costa at [email protected], Will Davies, Magdalene Fung
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