Goldman Sachs Wang Yajun: Hong Kong's annual IPO fundraising is expected to exceed 60 billion US dollars, hitting a new historical high.

The IPO market in Hong Kong has been thriving in the first half of this year. Wang Yajun, head of stock capital markets at Goldman Sachs Asia (excluding Japan), expressed confidence in the Hong Kong IPO market at a media briefing. With a strong project pipeline and multiple favorable factors, he believes that the fundraising scale of Hong Kong IPOs in the second half of the year is expected to remain hot, possibly exceeding the first half of the year and reaching a potential total of $60 billion (approximately HK$468 billion) for the whole year, setting a new historical high. Wang Yajun believes that the Hong Kong market has entered a new development stage dominated by AI. He stated that "the most active themes and stocks, the best-performing stocks with the most financing, are all related to AI." Regarding the discussion about an AI bubble in the market, he mentioned that the core of assessing the industry's prospects lies in underlying demand, and debating whether a bubble exists at this stage is not practically meaningful. In terms of recent changes in supply and demand such as rental computing power and storage capacity expansion, Wang Yajun believes that there is no need to overinterpret the actions of individual companies in the market. Looking at the demand side, the scale of AI usage by individuals and businesses continues to expand, leading to a long-term upward trend in capital expenditure for computing power, chips, and storage along the entire industry chain. The current AI boom in the Hong Kong stock market is characterized as a structural bull market driven by AI industry transformation, not by economic cycles. A+H listings have become the core support for fundraising in the Hong Kong stock market this year. Comparing the AI sectors in different markets, Wang Yajun mentioned that China and the United States have the most complete AI industry chains covering large models, computing power, chips, and a wider range of categories. The Hong Kong market has a more comprehensive coverage in the AI field, and more Chinese AI companies are expected to list on the Hong Kong stock market in the future. Behind the IPO boom is the support of regulatory policies in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange has continuously optimized listing rules for technology companies, such as lowering the threshold for secondary listings, aiming to attract more global long-term funds and encourage more innovative companies to list in Hong Kong. Despite upcoming multiple concentrated lock-up releases in the second half of the year, Wang Yajun believes that such lock-ups will not change the structural upward trend of the market, given the large capacity and international characteristics of the Hong Kong market. Wang Yajun admitted that large-scale financing of top global tech companies may cause short-term fund squeezes, but the market can digest it quickly. He also emphasized that the current major indices do not reflect the true face of the Hong Kong market, especially in the AI sector. Although the AI sector is booming, the overall market in Hong Kong has shown a mixed performance. The Hang Seng Index has dropped 10.7% in the first half of the year, underperforming major stock markets in Asia, while the Hang Seng Tech Index has fallen by 18.9% in half a day. Wang Yajun pointed out that the current major indices do not represent the current state of the Hong Kong market entering the AI era, hence the divergence between index weakening and the general rise of new and AI-related stocks. He added that there is no sign of weakening in the subscription enthusiasm for new AI-related IPOs.