Maoyan Weying, touted as China's largest online movie ticketing service provider, has filed for its initial public offering on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The move places it ahead of the competition, making Maoyan Weying the first Chinese ticketing platform to be publicly listed.
Aside from selling tickets through Maoyan and Gewara apps in China, Maoyan Weying also co-finances local films and distributes and markets foreign films. The company was previously involved with Stephen Chow's The Mermaid and Paramount's Transformers: The Last Knight. It assisted in marketing the 2017 romantic drama The Shape Of Water which received four Oscars.
Maoyan Weying did not reveal its target valuation in its filing but sources told Reuters it hopes to raise between $500 million and $1 billion valuations. The company is also mum about its share price and the size of the sales. Maoyan Weying has yet to respond to Reuters' request for comments.
For its IPO filing, Maoyan Weying submitted a prospectus under the name Entertainment Plus. The company says it holds a 60.9 percent share of China's online movie ticketing services market. The company plans to use sales incomes for acquisitions, research, and development, investments, enhance its content. The joint sponsors for the listing are the Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley. China Renaissance will act as the company's financial adviser.
China's movie market is already positioned as the second largest in the world, after the United States. The market size is currently at $11.1 billion and Maoyan Weying said it is enjoying about 133.5 million monthly users in the half of 2018 alone.
Maoyan used to operate on its own until it decided to merge with Weiying which used to be separate ticketing service backed up by Alibaba's tough competition, Tencent. Maoyan and Weiying finalized its merger in September 2017. By November, the company as one received about $150 million in funding from Tencent. The funding catapulted Maoyan Weying into a market valuation of $2.9 billion.
With the merger, Tencent has upped the stake of the competition for ticketing services against Alibaba that backs Tao Piao Piao which is also one of the major players in the online movie ticketing service market in China.
Maoyan is also backed by Meituan Dianping which also filed an IPO in Hong Kong this week and seeking as much as $55 billion market valuation.
Tencent, which backed both Maoyan and Meituan, competes with Alibaba on online-to-offline services in China. Meituan has the bigger market share in terms of market volume but Alibaba is out trying to take the spot. Recently, Alibaba consolidated Ele.me and Kuobei and raised $3 billion to make it one holding company.
