Affected by market doubts about the profit prospects of the autonomous driving industry, Momenta, an autonomous driving company invested by General Motors and valued at approximately US$9 billion, had a lackluster first day of listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This Chinese autonomous driving company raised a total of US$751 million in this IPO; the new share price was HK$303.80 (equivalent to US$38.74), which was only a slight increase of 2.8% on the first day of listing. During the same period, new stocks were listed on Hong Kong stocks.
Like most of its self-driving peers, Momenta is not yet profitable.
Despite the weak performance on the first day, the subscription enthusiasm for Momenta's new shares remained high: the public offering to retail investors was oversubscribed 413.6 times, and the institutional placement part was oversubscribed 20.3 times.
Momenta is headquartered in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. Nowadays, more and more autonomous driving companies are choosing to list in Hong Kong stocks to obtain financing and connect with Asian capital market investors. Momenta is one of them.
Pony.ai (stock code PONY, down 6.00%) and WeRide (stock code WRD, down 3.55%), which were previously listed in the United States, returned to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for secondary listings last year. Since this year, the Hong Kong stock prices of the two companies have fallen by 56% and 38% respectively, fully reflecting market concerns about the large-scale implementation of the autonomous driving industry and the speed of profit realization.
Like most companies on the autonomous driving track, Momenta is not yet profitable. The company's revenue last year increased 83% year-on-year, but its net loss widened from 3.21 billion yuan to 3.46 billion yuan, equivalent to $472.5 million.
The company stated that approximately 60% of the net proceeds raised from the IPO will be invested in research and development to iterate the core autonomous driving technology; the remaining 20% will be used for the commercialization and scale-up of the robotaxi business.
Momenta was established in 2016 and is mainly engaged in the research and development of complete autonomous driving systems for passenger cars and self-driving taxis. The company has cooperated with online ride-hailing giant Uber to launch self-driving taxis in Munich; it has also cooperated with Mercedes-Benz Group to launch an unmanned taxi project in Abu Dhabi; in the Southeast Asian market, it has cooperated with Grab to expand its self-driving taxi business.
Corporate customers and cooperative vehicle companies include mainstream vehicle manufacturers such as Toyota, BYD, and SAIC Motor.