Netease CEO, William Ding (Source: Bloomberg)

The world’s second-largest mobile games publisher NetEase carried out its secondary listing in Hong Kong on Thursday with shares popping as much as 8 percent on the first day of trading.

Each share was originally priced at 123 Hong Kong dollars (HKD), then rose by more than 8 percent to HKD 133 by lunchtime. The company raised a total of HKD 21.09 billion ($2.7 billion) from issuing about 171 million new shares in its Hong Kong listing.

The Guangzhou-based company said in its regulatory filings that it planned to use the money raised in its Hong Kong listing to fund its international expansion plans.

“Encouraged by our success in overseas markets such as Japan, we are more confident and committed than ever to extending our reach internationally,” said William Ding, CEO and Director of NetEase in the company’s first quarter earning’s report last month.

NetEase reported an 18.3% year-on-year increase of its net revenues to 17.1 billion yuan ($2.4 billion) in the first quarter of 2020. Net revenues of online game services reached 13.5 billion yuan ($1.9 billion), an increase of 14.1% compared with a year ago.

“I hope our employees will proudly create good content, services and products for our users in the next 20 years with passion and innovation,” Ding said in the listing ceremony in Thursday morning. “We should let more people experience different lives in the interactive world we create.”

The shares were up over 6 percent to HKD 130 at the close by late afternoon.

The original article can be found at https://pandaily.com/netease-makes-its-hong-kong-debut-shares-pop-8-on-first-day-of-trading/

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