Cloudary cancels IPO application

2013/07/23

An insider of Cloudary Corporation, China's largest copyright owner of online literature, said that the company is likely to file a new initial public offering (IPO) application after it announced plans to cancel an application to list IPO shares on the New York Stock Exchange on June 12, Chinese media reported.

In May 2011, Cloudary, owned by interactive media giant Shanda Group, filed an IPO application in a plan to raise $200 million in investment by listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Due to the sluggish capital market in the latter half of 2011, the company announced in July that year that it would suspend its IPO plan.

On January 25, 2012, Cloudary submitted documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for the second time to re-launch the listing plan.

But on June 12, Cloudary announced that the company had again canceled the IPO application. The reason being that the IPO application documents had not been updated for over one year. The SEC informed the company that the content was overdue. It also stated in the announcement that the cancellation did not impact the restarting time of the listing plan.

But with other investment in place, industry insiders predicted that Cloudary will not launch the IPO plan again in the near future.

On June 9, Cloudary announced that it had raised about $110 million through private placements from Goldman Sachs Investments Holdings (Asia) Ltd and Singapore-based investment company Temasek Holdings.

After that, a subordinate company of Xinhua News Agency announced it would invest in Cloudary on July 16. It will conduct strategic cooperation with the biggest online hub for contemporary Chinese literature in the fields of cultural and creative industry and new media. The investment amount has not been disclosed.

Analysts said that similar to previous methods of financing, Cloudary may sell shares to the subordinate company of Xinhua, but the proportion will be less than that of Goldman Sachs and Termasek.

(Source: China Daily)