Insurer Ping An’s Big Tech Adventure Stumbles
OneConnect’s shrunken initial public offering valuation in the U.S. is the latest sign of misplaced hubris
No shortage of ambition: the observation deck of the Ping An Finance Centre in Shenzhen, China.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/BloombergThe world’s second-largest insurer by market value is struggling to reinvent itself as a unicorn hub. Wariness by public investors toward unprofitable companies spells bad news for Ping An Insurance (Group) Co., which has plenty of tech firms it wants to take public at some point.
The latest casualty is OneConnect Financial Technology Co., a cloud-based back-end platform for banks and insurers. A planned initial public offering in the U.S. set for Thursday was cut by almost half to just $260 million from a target of $504 million. Ping An didn’t give an official reason. Valuations of the unprofitable fintech company will now fall to half of the $4.4 billion to $5.2 billion range floated when investors were sounded out last week.
That’s a blow to Ping An’s “technology-plus-finance” ambitions. Will the insurer lick its wounds or plow ahead? It can have a word with Masayoshi Son, still smarting from the WeWork debacle. His SoftBank Vision Fund bought into OneConnect last year at a valuation of $7.5 billion.
All this is a shame, because OneConnect is perhaps the Shenzhen-based company’s strongest spinoff, providing a needed service to financial institutions struggling with legacy computer systems. It operates in a less-competitive space than Ping An’s consumer-focused apps.