Chinese LiDAR company Hesai Group (HSAI) priced its IPO at $19.00 – the high end of its $17.00-to-$19.00 range – and upsized the deal to 10.0 million American Depositary Shares – up from 9.0 million ADS in the prospectus – to raise $190 million on Wednesday night (Feb. 8, 2023). Hesai’s ADS are expected to start trading on the NASDAQ today – Thursday, Feb. 9 – the last day of the Chinese New Year festival to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit. As Bloomberg reported, this is the biggest Chinese U.S. IPO since Didi.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Huatai Securities were the joint book-runners.
Hesai’s IPO attracted interest at launch from IPO investors who like the LiDAR sector, although some noted that the Shanghai-based company is not yet profitable. The ADS sold in Hesai’s IPO were issued by the company’s Cayman Islands-incorporated holding company – and not by the underlying business in China, according to the prospectus.
Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker, is among Hesai’s principal shareholders.
In the prospectus, the company says it believes that “Hesai Technology is the most commercially successful LiDAR company globally.” The prospectus says:
“Hesai Technology is the global leader in three-dimensional light detection and ranging (LiDAR) solutions. Its LiDAR products enable a broad spectrum of applications across (i) passenger or commercial vehicles with advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, (ii) autonomous vehicle fleets providing passenger and freight mobility services, or Autonomous Mobility, and (iii) other applications such as last-mile delivery robots, street sweeping robots, and logistics robots in restricted areas, or Robotics.”
Hesai’s prospectus says that Hesai Technology “has shipped over 103,000 LiDAR units from 2017 to December 31, 2022, and it has shipped over 80,400 LiDAR units in aggregate in 2022.”
Stay tuned.
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