Chinese fintech conglomerate Ant Group has quickly grown into an internet titan, owing not only to regulatory lag but also to its agile adaptation to rule changes. But recent strong official criticism of the firm, coming on top of the suspension of its IPO, suggests that the country's regulators have finally caught up.
HONG KONG – Ever since Alibaba founder Jack Ma criticized Chinese financial regulation in a speech last October, a regulatory storm has pummeled the country’s entire online financial and consumer sector. The Shanghai Stock Exchange suspended the planned initial public offering of fintech conglomerate Ant Group – an Alibaba affiliate – just two days before its launch, and regulators subsequently launched a massive crackdown on Chinese Big Tech. While Ma’s speech appears to have been an unforeseeable random event, the logic of Chinese bureaucratic politics made Ant’s IPO debacle inevitable.
HONG KONG – Ever since Alibaba founder Jack Ma criticized Chinese financial regulation in a speech last October, a regulatory storm has pummeled the country’s entire online financial and consumer sector. The Shanghai Stock Exchange suspended the planned initial public offering of fintech conglomerate Ant Group – an Alibaba affiliate – just two days before its launch, and regulators subsequently launched a massive crackdown on Chinese Big Tech. While Ma’s speech appears to have been an unforeseeable random event, the logic of Chinese bureaucratic politics made Ant’s IPO debacle inevitable.