HONG KONG: Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Sensetime Group relaunched its $767 million Hong Kong IPO on Monday, a week after the listing was pulled in the wake of the company’s inclusion in a US investment blacklist.
SenseTime retained its target to sell 1.5 billion shares between HK$3.85 and $HK3.99 each, according to regulatory filings, with a final price set on Thursday.
However, it will now rely on Cornerstone investors to buy about $511 million, or about 67% of the shares, up from $450 million, or 58% of the shares previously.
Sensetime said its inclusion in the US blacklist did not impose any restrictions on its business operations, but the resulting lack of US investors could hamper its ability to raise capital and reduce business liquidity in the future.
The US Treasury added SenseTime on December 10 to its list of “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” charged with developing a facial recognition program to determine a target’s ethnicity, with a focus on identifying ethnic Uighurs.
UN experts and rights groups estimate that more than a million people, mainly Uighurs and members of other Muslim minorities, were detained in a vast system of camps in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang in recent years Is.
Some foreign lawmakers and parliaments have labeled the treatment of Uighurs as genocide, citing evidence of forced sterilizations and deaths inside the camps. China denies these claims and says that the Uyghur population growth rate is above the national average.
“Our group’s products and services are for civilian and commercial use, and not for any military application,” SenseTime said in an amended filing on Monday.
The company had previously said that it “strongly opposes” the designation of the blacklist and that the allegations against it are baseless.
Shares of Sensetime are scheduled to start trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 30.
($1 = 7.8021 Hong Kong Dollar)
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