Chinese snack retailer Busy Ming surges 75% in Hong Kong debut
Market capitalisation at around $11 billion
Proceeds to fund supply-chain upgrade, new products
Cornerstone investors include Tencent, Temasek
HONG KONG/SINGAPORE, Jan 28 (Reuters) – Busy Ming Group (1768.HK), opens new tab shares jumped 75% on their Hong Kong trading debut on Wednesday, after the Chinese snack and beverage retailer raised HK$3.67 billion ($470 million) in an initial public offering.
The shares opened at HK$445 each, 88.1% higher than their offer price of HK$236.60. They fell back to about HK$414, giving Busy Ming a market capitalisation of around HK$89.2 billion.
Busy Ming sold 15.5 million shares in the IPO at the top end of a marketed range, versus an initially offered 14.1 million shares. The retail portion of the sale was nearly 1,900 times oversubscribed while the institutional portion was 44.44 times.
The company plans to use IPO proceeds for supply-chain improvement and product development, as well as to upgrade its store network and support franchisees.
Busy Ming was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Changsha in Hunan province. It described itself in its IPO prospectus as China’s largest snack and beverage chain retailer by sales value in 2024, citing consultancy Frost & Sullivan.
Busy Ming runs stores under the “Busy for You” and “Super Ming” brands, selling products such as biscuits, instant meals and drinks through a mainly franchised retail model.
It prices products about 25% below the average of comparable supermarket offerings, Frost & Sullivan said in the prospectus.
At September-end, it had 19,517 stores across 28 provinces, about 59% of which were in smaller towns and counties, the prospectus showed.
Revenue rose 75% to 46.4 billion yuan ($6.68 billion) in January-September 2025 versus the same period a year prior. The firm estimated full-year profit of not less than 2.3 billion yuan.
Cornerstone investors include social media and gaming major Tencent (0700.HK), opens new tab, Singapore state investor Temasek (TEM.UL), global investment firms BlackRock (BLK.N), opens new tab and FIL Investment, the prospectus showed.
Goldman Sachs (GS.N), opens new tab and Huatai International were joint sponsors of the IPO.
($1 = 7.7999 Hong Kong dollars)
Reporting by Donny Kwok in Hong Kong and Yantoultra Ngui in Singapore; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Christopher Cushing
Yantoultra Ngui is the Southeast Asia Deals Correspondent of Reuters in Singapore, covering M&A and capital market activities in a region that is fast emerging as one of the world’s biggest economies. He previously was a reporter at Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Notably, he was part of WSJ’s team that covered the financial scandal at Malaysian state fund 1MDB, and that won SOPA Excellence in Breaking News award for the coverage of the assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the half-brother of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, in Malaysia in 2018. Yantoultra graduated with an MBA in Finance from Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) in 2010.
