Ant Group, the Chinese financial technology company owned by Jack Ma, is set to raise around $34 billion when its shares begin trading in Hong Kong and Shanghai in the coming weeks.
If everything goes as planned, it would make its initial public offering the largest on record.
The company, the parent of the Alipay mobile payment service, priced its shares around $10.30 a piece, according to documents released on Monday by stock exchanges in the two cities.
At that price, the company would be worth around $310 billion, a market value comparable to that of JPMorgan Chase and more than that of many other global banks.
The money Ant raises would surpass the $29.4 billion that Saudi Arabia’s state-run oil company, Saudi Aramco, raised when it went public last year.
Ant’s listing would also be larger than that of its sister company, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which raised $25 billion when its shares started trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014.
Like other giant internet companies, Ant says its strength lies in performing a large number of different tasks at once. The more people use Alipay to purchase lattes, for example, the more data it gathers about their spending power.
Ant says this information helps it offer loans, investments and insurance policies that suit users’ needs. The data also helps Ant and its partner banks determine who is likely to pay them back.
Last year, Ant earned $2.7 billion in profit on $18 billion in revenue. It says it handled $17 trillion in digital payments in mainland China during the 12 months that ended in June.
