Chinese fashion retailer Shein is once again exploring a public listing in the U.S. later this year, while Founder Chris Xu is thinking about becoming a citizen of Singapore to help him get around proposed tighter restrictions on offshore initial public offerings (IPOs) in China, the South China Morning Post reported Tuesday (Jan. 25).
If Shein’s IPO is finalized, it would be the first major equity deal in the U.S. by a Chinese company since regulators increased their scrutiny of those kinds of deals in July, according to the report.
Shein began working on its IPO about two years ago but scrapped the idea because of too much market volatility during the pandemic and because of ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China, the report stated. The U.S. is Shein’s largest market for its online fashion marketplace. It ships goods to 150 countries and territories.
Neither Xu nor any other Shein executives have applied for citizenship in Singapore, a company spokesperson told South China Morning Post.
Shein made about 100 billion yuan (about $15.7 billion) in 2021. Its valuation was around $50 billion in early 2021 and is said to have doubled in the past year, according to the report.
If you had any doubt about eCommerce being a global operation, that doubt is gone at this point, as PYMNTS shows in the latest installment of the Cross-Border Retail Payments Tracker that almost half (46%) of the top 50 eCommerce sites now offer their websites in four or more languages.
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Read more: Nearly Half of Top eCommerce Sites Are Multilingual
Sixteen of these sites drew in more than one-fifth of their total traffic from cross-border visitors, with AliExpress, Steam, Booking.com, Samsung and Ikea making up the top five eCommerce sites by international traffic. Apple, Samsung and Shein took in more than 50% of their traffic from foreign countries.
