The massive fintech and world’s most valuable unicorn is prepping for an IPO.

Ant Group, the holding company for Alipay, the mobile payment service with over 1 billion users, reported a solid streak of profitability during the first six months of 2020.

The Jack Ma controlled company earned about 9.1 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) of profit in the recent June quarter. It profited 15.3 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) in the preceding March quarter. These numbers have been derived from the results for the June quarter declared by Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA). Alibaba holds 33% of Ant Group. (BusinessWire)

A profit record of $3.5 billion over six months is an impressive run-up to Ant’s IPO for which it filed preliminary filing documents a week ago.

Ant Group IPO

The company will go for dual listings in Hong Kong and Shanghai within the next few weeks, says Bloomberg. It will likely target a valuation of about $ 225 billion, making it by far the world’s largest IPO ever.

Moreover, sources told Bloomberg that the IPO could raise as much as $ 30 billion assuming markets remain bullish.

Shares of Ant Group will list on the Hong Kong stock exchange and the technology-heavy Star board in Shanghai.

The company’s giant fintech operations cover loans, mobile payments, even money market funds. Ant is likely to expand its operations to include payments for everything from flight tickets to food delivery.

Meanwhile, it is already China’s dominant mobile payments company. It is now planning to set up a consumer finance firm in the south-western city of Chongqing, according to Reuters.

The digital nature of the operations of Ant Group, as well as the massive e-commerce business of its parent Alibaba Group, may have benefited from the COVID 19 pandemic.

This was apparent from the statement of Alibaba Group on its June quarter results.

COVID-19

“We were well-positioned to capture growth from the ongoing digital transformation, which has been accelerated by the pandemic, in both consumption and enterprise operations,” said Daniel Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba Group. “We mobilized our entire digital infrastructure to support the economic recovery of businesses across a wide range of sectors while broadening and diversifying our consumer base by addressing their changing preferences in a post-COVID-19 environment.”

Indeed, Alibaba reported that annual active consumers on its China retail marketplaces hit 742 million in the quarter. This is compared to 674 million for the same quarter in 2019, an approximately 10 percent increase.

June quarter’s revenue of $ 21.8 billion represented an increase of 34% year-on-year.

“Our domestic core commerce business has fully recovered to pre-COVID-19 levels across the board, while cloud computing revenue grew 59% year-over-year,” said Maggie Wu, Chief Financial Officer of Alibaba Group. “Our strong profit growth and cash flow enable us to continue to strengthen our core business and invest for long term growth.”

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