CATL gauges interest for potential $5 billion HK listing

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., the world’s largest maker of batteries for electric vehicles, began gauging investor interest for a share sale that may fetch $5 billion and will probably be Hong Kong’s biggest listing in years. 

CATL, as the Chinese electric-vehicle battery giant is known, launched its investor education meetings on Tuesday, according to terms of the deal seen by Bloomberg. The Hong Kong trading debut will likely occur as early as this month, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The company is barreling ahead with the offering in spite of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs having roiled global markets. Given its scale, the deal’s success will likely influence investor confidence in Hong Kong and Chinese companies, whose shares have underperformed global peers amid the tariffs-induced market turmoil. 

Still, Chinese corporations appear to be taking the trade war in stride and powered on with share sales last month, while offerings in the U.S. and Europe have slumped.

The CATL deal came after a U.S. congressional committee in April called for Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to withdraw from working on the planned listing. Both banks are still working on the offering, according to CATL’s post-listing-hearing documents dated Tuesday.

House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party Chairman John Moolenaar, in letters addressed to the two banks’ chief executive officers, highlighted the company’s inclusion in a Pentagon blacklist in January, citing its alleged links to the Chinese military. A CATL spokesperson has said the allegations in the letters are without merit and the company has never engaged in any military-related business or activities.

At $5 billion, CATL’s listing would be the world’s biggest since cold-storage real estate investment trust Lineage Inc.’s $5.1 billion deal last year, and Hong Kong’s largest since Kuaishou Technology’s $6.2 billion offering in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Hong Kong listings have raised $2.7 billion so far this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. CATL’s expected proceeds would nearly triple that figure, and other big deals like that of drugmaker Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals Co. are also under way. Hong Kong listing proceeds could more than double to $22 billion this year, according to Bloomberg Intelligence estimates. 

CATL in April reported a solid set of results for the first quarter, with net income growing at the fastest pace in nearly two years. Executives at CATL, a top supplier to Tesla Inc. and many other large automakers, described the impact of U.S. tariffs as “little” and said the company’s U.S. exposure was “quite small.”

CATL’s share sale will feed into its ongoing international expansion in Europe, where much of the funds raised will be funneled to completing a factory capable of producing 100 gigawatt-hours annually in Hungary to supply top tier clients like Mercedes-Benz. The company has a market share of roughly 38%, while EV maker BYD Co., which mostly makes cells for its own cars, is a distant second at about 17%. 

Seperately, the company is seeking a loan of about $1 billion to fund an investment in Indonesia, according to people familiar with the matter.

CATL’s shares have fallen 12% this year in Shenzhen, compared with a 3.4% decline in the CSI 300 Index.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com