China’s Latest IPO Investment: Death

December 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Dec 2, 2013

China’s Latest IPO Investment: Death

ISABELLA STEGER

If childbirth was the investment theme for November in China, then this month investors will have the chance to invest in something quite the opposite — a funeral services provider. Shanghai-based Fu Shou Yuan Group Ltd. is set to become the first such company in the country to go public. The biggest operator of cemeteries and provider of funeral services in China is looking to raise around $200 million in an initial public offering in Hong Kong, a person with knowledge of the matter said Tuesday.About half of those proceeds will be used to develop new cemeteries, the person said. Fu Shou Yuan’s IPO roadshow will kick off next week, and the company is targeting a listing date of Dec. 20.

Globally, other publicly traded funeral service providers include InvoCare Ltd.IVC.AU -1.25% in Australia and Texas-based Service Corp. International.

Fu Shou Yuan, which was established in 2003, operates in eight cities in China including Shanghai, Chongqing, Hefei, Jinan, Zhengzhou, Jinzhou, Xiamen and Nanchang, according to its website.

Elderly care and death are big businesses in China, where the population is aging rapidly.The number of old people for every hundred working-age person, or the dependency ratio, is expected to rise from 11 in 2010 to 24 in 2050, according to United Nations estimates. There are about 185 million elderly people in the country. Domestic and foreign investors, for example, have been investing in elderly housing in China.

Citigroup Inc. is the sole sponsor and bookrunner of the IPO.

Filed under Macro Trends

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: