NEW YORK, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- China's ZTO Express (ZTO) started trading under the ticker symbol "ZTO" at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Thursday, after raising over 1.4 billion U.S. dollars in its initial public offering (IPO) - the largest one in the U.S. so far this year.
ZTO announced Wednesday that it had priced its initial public offering of 72,100,000 American depositary shares (ADSs) at 19.50 dollars apiece for a total offering size of approximately 1.4 billion dollars, assuming the underwriters do not exercise their over-allotment option to purchase additional ADSs.
Each ADS represents one Class A ordinary share of ZTO. The Company has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 10,815,000 additional ADSs.
Morgan Stanley & Co. International plc, Goldman Sachs (Asia) L.L.C., China Renaissance Securities (Hong Kong) Limited, Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC acted as joint bookrunners for the offering.
Shares of ZTO tumbled 15.03 percent to 16.57 dollars apiece at the closing Thursday.
"The short-term volatility of ZTO's stocks won't affect my confidence in our company's long-term run. We believe that our business will keep growing at a fast pace relying on China's huge and rapidly expanding express service market as well as e-commerce market," said Meisong Lai, the founder and chairman of ZTO.
ZTO, a Shanghai-based express delivery company, provides express delivery service as well as other value-added logistics services through its extensive and reliable nationwide network in China, which covers over 96 percent of China's cities and counties as of June 30, 2016.
According to the iResearch, ZTO is one of the largest express delivery companies globally, in terms of total parcel volume in 2015.
ZTO is both a key enabler and a direct beneficiary of China' s fast-growing e-commerce market, and has established itself as one of the largest express delivery service providers for millions of online merchants and consumers transacting on leading Chinese e-commerce platforms, such as Alibaba and JD.com.
"ZTO' s business model grants us a unique advantage in market competition, which allows ZTO to achieve strong operating leverage by minimizing fixed costs and capital requirements," Meisong Lai told Xinhua.
ZTO operates a highly scalable network partner model, which the firm believes is best suited to support the significant growth of e-commerce in China. ZTO leverages its network partners to provide pickup and last-mile delivery services, while controlling the mission-critical line-haul transportation and sorting network within the express delivery service value chain, said the ZTO profile.
ZTO's IPO surpasses the 1.1 billion dollars IPO of Japanese messaging company Line and makes it the biggest Chinese company IPO in the U.S. since Alibaba, which made history with its 25 billion dollars blockbuster IPO in 2014, according to the Forbes. Enditem
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