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Chinese cosmetics giant Yatsen Holding Ltd., parent company of the Perfect Diary brand, rose 75 percent in its trading debut, raising $617 million in a US initial public offering.
The company sold 58.75 million American depositary shares at $10.50 each. The shares closed at $18.40 on Thursday in New York, giving the company a market value of $7.82 billion.
According to Yatsen’s disclosures, Perfect Diary was the only brand of colour cosmetics to have gross merchandising volume (GMV) of 100 million yuan ($15.2 million) on Tmall for each month in 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. Yatsen also owns the Abby’s Choice moisturiser brand and its Little Ondine brand tops the eyeliner/mascara category on Tmall. In October Yatsen also bought skincare brand Galenic from French group Pierre Fabre for an undisclosed sum.
The Shenzhen-based company says it has a fan base of 48 million people and served 23.5 million direct-to-consumer customers in the first nine months of 2020. Yatsen also has a network of more than 200 offline retail stores.
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According to its prospectus, Yatsen swung to a net loss of 1.2 billion yuan ($170.4 million) in the first nine months of 2020 from net income of 29.1 million yuan ($4.4 million) a year earlier. Its revenues increased to 3.27 billion yuan ($497.5 million) from 1.89 billion yuan ($287.5 million) over the same period last year.
The IPO comes as US regulators push US-listed Chinese companies to comply with auditing rules that many Chinese firms say would not be allowed by authorities in China, there are fears this could lead to the delisting of Chinese companies from US stock exchanges if they don’t comply.
