On June 11, 2026, the news that Ant International was going to be listed attracted widespread market attention.
After six years of silence, Ant is no longer obsessed with listing the company as a whole, but has changed its direction and plans to first launch its overseas business rooted in Singapore on a separate listing. A brand-new capital layout instantly stirred up the entire investment banking circle.
On the one hand, the much-anticipated trillion-dollar IPO was stopped midway, and on the other hand, overseas entities are now separated for independent financing. Behind these two choices are huge changes in the corporate operating environment and development ideas in the past six years.
The main entity that is rumored to be listed this time is called Ant International. It is headquartered in Singapore and is also the core carrier of all Ant’s overseas businesses. Its overall revenue accounts for about 20% of the group’s overall revenue.
It includes three core businesses: Alibaba Paijia, which is used to connect e-wallets around the world to facilitate cross-border travel and consumption; Ernan, which specializes in helping overseas merchants handle multi-country payment orders; and Wanlihui World First, which mainly serves foreign trade merchants for cross-border fund settlement.
Its business scope covers hundreds of markets, connecting hundreds of millions of merchants and more than 1 billion overseas consumer accounts.
From the perspective of operating data, Ant International completed US$30 billion in revenue last year, and will maintain a steady growth of more than 20% every year in the future.
According to the current plan, the company plans to carry out a round of financing with a scale of US$1 billion. Upon completion, the overall valuation is expected to reach tens of billions of US dollars, and preparations for a Hong Kong stock listing will begin as soon as possible.
However, the relevant process is still in the discussion stage and there is no final decision yet.
Many people still have memories of this past event.
Earlier, Ant Group had finalized the simultaneous listing of A-shares and Hong Kong stocks. The estimated financing scale was close to 34.5 billion U.S. dollars, and the overall market value exceeded 2 trillion. It was expected to be the largest IPO in the world at that time.
When the news of the listing spread, the popularity was unprecedented. The book assets of many shareholding employees increased significantly, and the surrounding markets were also driven by sentiment.
However, this massive listing process was urgently suspended when it was about to land.
After that, Ant launched a comprehensive rectification that lasted several years and completed a number of business standard adjustments.
At the same time, the company’s equity structure has changed, the founder’s relevant voting rights have shrunk significantly, and the company’s overall business model and governance structure are very different from before.
After the local listing was shelved, it was difficult to completely restart, so splitting the overseas business and listing it separately became a safer path.
Domestic business is mainly focused on compliance and stable operations, and the pace should not be too fast.
However, the overseas cross-border payment foreign trade service track is still in the expansion period, with sufficient market space and relatively independent business models.
A separate financing and listing can not only obtain funds to expand overseas outlets and improve the global compliance system, but will not affect the overall complex business structure of the group, and the risks will be more dispersed.
But this road also has its challenges. Financial regulatory rules vary from place to place overseas, and competition in the cross-border payment industry continues to intensify. If you want to stabilize growth and gain recognition from the capital market, you must not only continue to expand merchant resources, but also adapt to the compliance requirements of different regions. The operating pressure is not easy.
From rushing to achieve a trillion-dollar market value as a whole, to splitting up overseas businesses and gradually laying out its layout, Ant’s transformation in the past six years is also a microcosm of many large Internet companies.
The era of rapid expansion is slowly passing. Rather than pursuing a one-time high valuation listing, step-by-step development of compliance operations to slowly polish the business foundation has become a more common choice.
The grand IPO that year was not completed. Now it has changed its path and started again. Whether the subsequent overseas business listing can be successfully implemented and whether the overseas payment business can continue to gain a firm foothold in the market depends on the subsequent business performance.
Do you think it will be safer for Ant to split up and list overseas than to list it as a whole?
