China online learning company iHuman Inc saw its share price fall 4.6% from last week's closing price to $15.26 each in pre-market trading Monday. But the share price traded up by more than 30 percent during their debut on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday.
The company, considered to be the leading child "edutainment" provider in China, opened its stock in New York at $12.12 per share. Demand saw the price jump by more than 30% before closing at $16 per share. This gave the company a market capitalization of $800 million. According to its prospectus, iHuman will spend around 35% of the proceeds to expand its products and services in China and overseas. The rest will be used to improve business infrastructure, marketing and brand promotion.
"Parents will always chase products with higher educational efficiency. For online education companies, only by continuously creating and providing better products and services can they survive in the market," iHuman's founder and chairperson Chi Yufeng said in a statement.
The company said it was seeing rapid growth in online education - particularly during the pandemic. However, iHuman says it will continue to develop its offline business. The company's chief executive officer Dai Peng said offline services such as in-person readings would be important to the overall education of its customers.
During the first six months iHuman reported revenues of 185.5 million yuan - nearly double that of the same period last year. The company said most of its revenues came from subscribers who get access to its premium online learning applications. Most users are parents with children aged between 3 and 8.
This year monthly active users had grown from 3.2 million last year to 9.3 million. Subscribers had grown from 600,000 last year to more than 2.1 million.
