Initial Public Offering Archives - International Finance

People’s IPO: Dangote Refinery floats Africa’s largest share sale

International Finance Business Desk — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 03:00:59 +0000

Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote on Monday launched “Africa’s largest share sale,” taking his oil refinery public in an initial public offering (IPO) that could raise as much as USD 2.1 billion to fund the energy venture’s expansion.

The Dangote Refinery IPO offers the general public a roughly 3% stake in the refinery. Dangote, Africa’s richest man, has described the offering as a “people’s IPO,” saying the move was intended to give ordinary Nigerians an opportunity to participate in the plant’s success.

However, the refinery’s private placement in July required institutional investors to pay a lower valuation than retail investors.

Back then, the placement raised USD 2.5 billion for a 6% stake, valuing the refinery at around USD 40 billion.

If everything goes as per Dangote’s plans, the refinery’s IPO may end up valuing the company closer to USD 49 billion.

ALSO READ | Nigeria’s domestic crude swap proposal could cut refining costs

Stating that the IPO opened with a low investment threshold, CEO David Bird told Reuters that the discount offered to institutional investors reflected conditions attached to the private placement, including a lock-up period.

If fully subscribed, the IPO on Nigeria’s main stock exchange may raise 2.15 trillion naira, or about USD 1.6 billion.

The amount could rise to roughly USD 2.1 billion if the offering gets oversubscribed and the company exercises a greenshoe option to issue additional shares.

Dangote Refinery has designed its IPO to attract retail investors through a relatively low entry threshold. These investors can purchase as few as 10 shares through fintech and other digital investment platforms, requiring a minimum investment of about USD 4.

That compares with the approximately USD 8 minimum investment for retail investors in telecoms company MTN Nigeria’s 2021 share offering, based on the exchange rate at the time.

As per the investment app Bamboo, interest in the Dangote IPO has already been evident among Nigerian retail investors.

The app saw traffic to its platform growing significantly higher than usual immediately after the IPO’s launch.

Institutional investors too have kept their eyes on the IPO’s direction. UAE state oil giant ADNOC had previously expressed interest in investing in the plant, going by Dangote’s statement in the lead-up to the market listing.

The refinery came into the limelight this year by capitalising on the increased demand for its products, especially jet fuel, following Iran war-related supply disruptions.

By June, Dangote Refinery emerged as a major global and regional supplier of jet fuel (Jet A-1), operating at a high capacity of 650,000 to 700,000 barrels per day. It was a massive achievement for the refinery since it began operations in 2024.

The facility currently processes 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day and aims to increase capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day by 2029.

The IPO also forms part of Dangote’s broader plan to bring his business empire to public markets, with the African tycoon having the long-term goal of listing every company in his conglomerate, with operations spanning cement, sugar, and salt.

Dangote Refinery will be eyeing a secondary US listing within three to four years.

The post People’s IPO: Dangote Refinery floats Africa’s largest share sale appeared first on International Finance.

Unitree IPO puts a price on China’s humanoid robot bet

International Finance Business Desk — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:08 +0000

Chinese robot maker Unitree has priced its Shanghai initial public offering (IPO) at 150.80 yuan a share, seeking about 6.1 billion yuan, or USD 904 million, in a deal that will make it the first humanoid robot manufacturer listed on the mainland.

The Hangzhou-based company is offering roughly 40.45 million shares, or 10% of its enlarged share capital, on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market. At that price the company is worth around 60.99 billion yuan, close to USD 9 billion.

The reception has been extraordinary even by the standards of China’s technology listings. The offering was more than 8,000 times oversubscribed by retail investors, with the company disclosing odds of roughly 0.018% of receiving shares after a partial reallocation away from the institutional tranche.

A single lot of 500 shares requires a payment of 75,400 yuan, which has not deterred buyers hoping for a first-day pop.

The regulatory path was just as quick. The application was accepted on March 20 and cleared the listing committee on June 1, a span of 73 days and a record for the board.

What investors are actually paying for

The valuation is the story. The offer price implies a diluted price to earnings ratio of 219.23 for 2025 and a price to sales ratio of 35.89, both far above comparable general equipment manufacturers, against a reference industry multiple of 38.56 times.

The company itself warned investors about the risk of a share price decline given the premium. The final price came in about 45% above a market consensus of around 104 yuan after bookbuilding with institutions.

Underneath that multiple is a business growing at a rate few hardware firms manage. Revenue rose to 1.70 billion yuan in 2025 from 392.77 million yuan in 2024 and 159.13 million yuan in 2023, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) above 220%.

Reported net profit was 278.21 million yuan, while net profit attributable to the parent after excluding one-off items, chiefly share-based payment charges, stood at 590.75 million yuan.

The headline 219 times multiple is calculated on the lower of those two figures. Between 2023 and 2025 the company sold 33,294 quadruped robots and 5,632 humanoids, and gross margin on the core business climbed to 60.13%.

The strategic investor list explains part of the enthusiasm. Institutions taking 20% of the issuance include DeepSeek, Tencent’s Qishan Investment, PetroChina’s Kunlun Capital, China Southern Power Grid’s industrial finance arm and Tianyi Capital, alongside three National Social Security Fund portfolios.

DeepSeek alone was allocated 933,390 shares with a 36-month lock-up, a pairing meant to bridge large language models and robot hardware. This is state-adjacent capital and platform capital arriving together, which is how Beijing tends to signal that a sector matters.

Why everyone is rushing the exit door at once

Unitree is not an outlier. It is the first mover in a queue. AgiBot, valued above 20 billion yuan after backing from Tencent, JD.com and SAIC Motor, began its Hong Kong listing process in July, the first among a wave of 30 to 50 Chinese embodied intelligence startups to disclose listing plans.

It has also acquired a controlling stake in Shanghai-listed Swancor Advanced Materials, securing a mainland platform. IPO applications from Leju Robotics and DEEP Robotics have been accepted in Shenzhen and Shanghai respectively.

UBTech, which listed in Hong Kong in December 2023 as the first humanoid robot stock anywhere, saw its shares surge 150% in 2025 against a 32% rise in the Hang Seng Index.

Three forces are pushing companies towards public markets simultaneously. The first is capital intensity. Building humanoids requires actuators, reducers, sensors and factories, the training data problem is unsolved, and the burn rate is high while revenue is thin.

The second is the policy window. The 15th Five-Year Plan covering 2026 to 2030 elevates robotics and embodied intelligence from a niche subsidy target into the connective tissue of China’s economic modernisation strategy, with component localisation targets written into the top-level document rather than into subordinate ministry plans.

A 1 trillion yuan state venture fund for artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and emerging technologies sits behind it. Listing while that support is explicit is simply cheaper than listing later.

The third force is the valuation cycle itself. Sector financing in China reached 73.5 billion yuan in 2025, and the first two months of 2026 alone exceeded 20 billion yuan. Private rounds at those levels create pressure for public exits before enthusiasm cools.

The industrial base beneath the hype

The humanoid narrative sits on top of an automation build-out that is already the largest in history. China accounted for 54% of all industrial robots installed worldwide in 2024, or 295,000 of 542,000 units, and its installed base of about two million machines is roughly 4.5 times that of Japan in second place. Global operational stock stood at 4.66 million.

More telling is who supplies them. The share of local suppliers in Chinese domestic installations rose from 30% in 2020 to 57% in 2024, and Chinese firms now hold 85% of the domestic metal and machinery segment. For the first time, Chinese robot makers sold more units at home than foreign competitors.

China also became a net exporter of industrial robots for the first time in 2025, and first-half 2026 exports reached 6.29 billion yuan, up 18.6% year on year, shipped to 141 countries and regions.

That is the import substitution story Made in China 2025 promised, delivered a decade later in a sector Western suppliers once dominated.

One caveat is worth stating plainly. On robot density, China is not yet the leader. Using updated labour market data from its own statistics bureau, the International Federation of Robotics puts China at 166 robots per 10,000 manufacturing employees, sixth in Asia and 22nd worldwide, against 307 in the United States.

Western Europe reached a record 267 and North America 204. China’s advantage is absolute scale, not saturation, which is precisely why the runway is long.

China against the West

On volume, the humanoid contest is already lopsided. Roughly 16,000 humanoid robots were installed worldwide in 2025, with China accounting for more than 80%, according to Counterpoint Research, which put AgiBot on 30.4% of global installations and Unitree on 26.4%.

Omdia ranks AgiBot first on 5,168 units and a 39% share, a reading Unitree disputes with its own claim of more than 5,500 humanoids shipped. American rivals including Tesla and Figure each shipped a few hundred units at most.

On money, the West leads by a distance. Figure is valued at about USD 39 billion after a Series C exceeding USD 1 billion in September 2025, roughly four times Unitree’s listed value, with 1X at around USD 10 billion and Apptronik at about USD 5.5 billion.

Tesla remains the wild card, with Optimus V3 expected to enter mass production in the second half of 2026 on a converted Fremont line. Unitree’s own prospectus names Optimus and new entrants from Chinese carmakers as material competitive risks.

The historical pattern from solar panels, drones and electric vehicles is that scale wins once the underlying technology commoditises, which is the bet embedded in Unitree’s multiple.

Automation as industrial policy

For an economy facing a shrinking working-age population and rising wages, robots are a labour supply story as much as a technology story.

Automation is how China intends to keep its manufacturing base competitive while the demographic base erodes, and how it plans to cut dependence on imported precision components.

The Robot Plus initiative and the AI Plus Manufacturing roadmap aim to double manufacturing robot density by 2030, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has set up a standardisation committee for humanoid robots, and China is now leading formulation of international standards for elder-care robots, echoing its earlier standards campaigns in 5G and high-speed rail.

The risks arrived before the shares did. Overseas sales generated 731.66 million yuan in 2025, or 43.65% of main business revenue, and on July 28 the United States Federal Communications Commission added foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List, blocking equipment authorisation for models not already cleared.

Unitree certified its current lineup weeks earlier, so those grants stand, but the North American path for new models is closed for now. The Pentagon has separately listed the company as having alleged military links, which Beijing rejects.

Growth is also cooling. First-half 2026 revenue guidance of 1.05 billion to 1.13 billion yuan implies growth of 36% to 45%, against 333% a year earlier, and adjusted net profit is guided to fall by between 6% and 22%.

A 219 times earnings multiple leaves no room for that trend to continue. Investors chasing lottery odds of 0.018% may find that out.

The post Unitree IPO puts a price on China’s humanoid robot bet appeared first on International Finance.

How Does the Stock Market Work?

International Finance Desk — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 05:39:11 +0000

New investors think the stock market as a short term investment vehicle where you can reap huge profit or heavy losses; however, this is not true.

22nd July 2013

For a new investor the stock market is baffling, which probably helps to explain why so many people lose money when they invest. In this article, International Finance Magazine explains the different aspects of the stock market. The stock market is a place where you can buy and sell shares of different companies. New investors think the stock market as a short term investment vehicle where you can reap huge profit or heavy losses; however, this is not true. An in-depth understanding of the stock exchange market will help you make better and invest wisely. Let us begin with the basics:

A share of stock is literally a share in the company; academicians define shares as “A share is a share in the share capital of a company”. When you buy a share you are entitled to a small fraction of the assets and earnings of the company. Assets include everything the company owns including Building, Furniture, Fixtures, Cash etc and earnings are the revenue the company earns through selling its products or services. A company would need to share its assets and earnings with the public because it needs to raise capital, companies can raise capital through two ways to start their businesses or for diversification and expansion, the first one is through debt financing or equity financing. The disadvantage of raising money through loans and advances is the company has to pay interest on the borrowing which is a constraint in the longer run. By selling stocks, the company can raise capital with fewer obligations. Equity financing is better suited to companies because it distributes the risks of doing business among a large pool of investors. If the company falters, the promoters don’t lose all the money as the loss is borne by the shareholders of the company. The stock exchange operates at two different markets: Firstly, it is a market for the issuers who wish to raise equity capital by offering shares for sale to investors in an Initial Public Offering (IPO), this is also known as a new issue and the point where a company decides to ‘float’ on the stock exchange or where an existing company is looking to raise additional funds by issuing further shares. It is also a market for investors who can buy and sell shares at anytime, without directly affecting the entities in which they are buying the shares (for e.g. a secondary market). As a retail investor, you cannot buy or sell shares directly on a stock exchange such as London Stock Exchange, you have to place your orders through a stock exchange member firm, such Barclays stockbrokers who will then execute the order on your behalf. This process will require the retail investor to open a trading account, to be listed on the stock exchange a stock must meet the listing requirements laid down by that exchange in its approval process. It is also possible for a stock to be listed on more than two exchanges which will give more liquidity as dual listing on stock exchanges in different time zones will increase the hours during which you can trade the stock. Stock Exchanges use remarkable and highly reliable computer systems to handle the exchanges of stocks between buyers and sellers and to set opening and closing prices. For example, the NASDAQ has three separate components;

Interface: A place where broker dealers and market makers can gain access to the system.

Matching engine: A computer that connects sellers and buyers when their prices match

Quote services: Data feeding the buy and sell quotes that NASDAQ provides

In the United States, there are three main exchanges on which stocks are traded, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ (National Association of Stock Dealers Automated Quotations), and the AMEX (American Stock Exchange). Most other countries have their own exchanges, in Japan it’s the TSE (Tokyo Stock Exchange), DAX in Germany and SENSEX in India, these are the markets where only stocks are traded. There are other markets such as the commodities market where oil and gold are traded. There also markets for bonds and currencies and sub-markets within all these markets.

Stock Averages

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and the NASDAQ composite index are the broad market averages designed to give you a general idea of how companies traded in the stock exchange are doing. Dow Jones Average is the sum of value of thirty large American stocks including Exxon-Mobile, General Motors which makes up the index. The Standard and Poor (S&P) index is a stock market index based on the market capitalizations of 500 leading companies publicly traded in the U.S. stock market. These averages suggest the general health of the stock prices as a whole. If the economy is doing well, then the prices of the stocks rise en masse in what is known as bull market. If the stocks are not performing well, with falling prices it is called a bear market.

Why do Stock Prices Fluctuate?

Stock prices are not fixed, they tend to fluctuate from the second it is sold to the public, its price will rise and fall primarily because of changes in supply and demand, however, there are many reasons for a stock to fluctuate. An insider who holds significant stock, may want to diversity his overall portfolio and thus need to sell a large amount of stock, this will increase supply and likely to reduce the prices of the stock. Many investors watch insider selling to ascertain the health of the company. There are many things that may be considered news which is material to a certain company and its stock. Stock prices of a company fluctuate not only on the basis of financial performance of the company but also on the news related to its competitors, news about the economy, natural calamities and other factors which effects the economy of the country. An expert says “A very large portion of trades are from computer programs trained to make trades when certain apparent patterns are observed. Since these programs are not all designed in the same way, much of the supply and demand is a result of different algorithms with different “opinions” on what the stock is doing”.

The post How Does the Stock Market Work? appeared first on International Finance.