On December 11, the world saw yet another Chinese internet company hit US stock exchanges as Momo, a social dating app, IPO’d on NASDAQ and raised US$216 million. One week later, a different Momo released its shares to the public. But unlike the company that shares its namesake, this Momo has a long and unusual history.
Taiwan’s Fubon Multimedia Technology Co., known among consumers as Momo, hit the domestic stock exchange Friday morning with individual shares priced at NT$230 (about US$7.30) and with a market cap of NT$37 billion (about US$1.1 billion), according to United Daily News. By the end of trading, shares soared to NT$283 (about US$9.00), and the company had raised NT$1.42 billion (about US$45 million) – marking the biggest IPO of the year on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
Momo is a strange beast. Its parent company and majority shareholder, Fubon Group, holds properties in banking, finance, insurance, real estate, and telecommunications (it owns Taiwan Mobile, the island’s biggest carrier). In 2004, the company established Fubon Multimedia Technology as a subsidiary and then launched home shopping TV channel Momo TV the following year. That venture turned out to be a huge success – the company states it was breaking even after one year – and paved the way towards investment in other shopping properties. It quickly rolled out catalogue shopping, a drugstore chain, and an ill-fated department store.
But Momo’s biggest success aside from TV shopping has been its ecommerce property, which sells department store-esque goods through a business-to-consumer model. Launched in 2005, the site began as a way to offer viewers of its channel discounted goods. Bolstered by the visibility from its TV channel, it slowly caught up to Taiwan’s biggest ecommerce players, particularly in beauty and makeup categories. According to fresh data from Euromonitor, 5.7 percent of online retail sales were captured by Momo in 2013, up from 2.9 percent in 2009. Yahoo! Taiwan and PCHome, meanwhile, made up 10.8 percent and 8 percent respectively.
Momo’s revenues reflect its growth in market share. UDN states that revenues for the past 11 months amounted to NT$ 21.7 billion (about US$689 million), up 18 percent year-on-year. 52 percent of the company’s revenues come from ecommerce.
Fubon Multimedia Technologies president C.F. Lin told UDN that growth and expansion of Momo’s ecommerce business remains a priority. The company plans to open a 66,000 square meter automated logistics facility in Taoyuan in 2016, and also expressed a commitment to expanding into Southeast Asia or possibly China.
(Source: UDN)
Editing by Steven Millward; top image by Max Chu
This post TV and online shopping site Momo hits the Taiwan stock exchange appeared first on Tech in Asia.
TV and online shopping site Momo hits the Taiwan stock exchange
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