Ant Group, the payment- and finance-focused sister company of the Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba, filed paperwork on Tuesday to list shares in Hong Kong and Shanghai, the first steps toward what could be a blockbuster initial public offering. Online finance has exploded in China in recent years, and Ant’s flagship service, Alipay, has been a key driver. Relatively few people in China had credit cards when e-retail and other internet services began taking off in the country. In China, $67 trillion in transactions were conducted on mobile devices in 2018, according to estimates by the research firm Bernstein. Many of those took place through Alipay and WeChat, a rival digital wallet and messaging app owned by another Chinese internet giant, Tencent.

Source: New York Times August 25, 2020 09:46 UTC