Key Takeaways:
- Baiwang has filed for a Hong Kong IPO, claiming the spot as China’s second-largest provider of financial data analytical services for micro and small enterprises
- The company’s referral fees paid to marketing agents jumped more than six-fold from 24.5 million yuan in 2020 to 170 million yuan last year
By Li Shih Ta
Big business opportunities can come in the mountains of small invoices and other financial data at many small companies. It also helps to have some assistance from China’s tax authority, whose 2015 pivot from a paper- to a digital-based invoice and tax management system has paved the way for a new generation of service providers helping companies make sense of all their new digital data.
One provider of such services, Baiwang Co. Ltd., is presenting its own latest financial data to the Hong Kong securities regulator with its filing for a listing on the city’s stock exchange earlier this month. The filing marks Baiwang’s second listing attempt, following an earlier application that failed last June. The company also tried but failed to list on China’s domestic A-share market in 2021.
The digitization of government-issued tax and other company financial information has been a building goldmine of information since China piloted a nationwide e-invoice service platform in 2021. Baiwang entered the business of providing analytic services for such data even earlier, helping it to attract more than 1 billion yuan ($139 million) in four funding rounds from A-list investors like Alibaba and Fosun dating back to 2017.
According to its latest filing, Baiwang ranked first in processing cloud-based digital tax and financial transaction data in 2022, with 6.6% of the market. That same year it topped its rivals by successfully processing about 700 million invoice requests.
Despite its own ability to help others understand their finances, however, Baiwang’s own finances look a little shakier. The company’s revenue has grown strongly over the ...