Biel Crystal, a major supplier of touchscreen cover glass to Apple, is reviving its plan to list in Hong Kong after postponing the share sale last year, when markets turned choppy amid China's regulatory crackdown.
The Hong Kong-based company filed for an initial public offering recently without disclosing the size of fundraising, but Bloomberg reported last June that it was aiming to raise between US$1 billion (HK$7.8 billion) and US$2 billion for the first listing attempt.
Established in 1989, Biel Crystal is one of the biggest suppliers of cover glass and touch screens to smartphone makers including Apple, Samsung Electronics, Xiaomi (1810) and Huawei Technologies.
The company is controlled by its founders Yeung Kin-man and his wife Lam Wai-ying, who together rank fourth in Hong Kong's Richest 2021 listed by Forbes.
With a net worth of US$18.6 billion, the couple was ranked after property moguls Li Ka-shing, Lee Shau-kee, and Henry Cheng Kar-shun's family.
Yeung, who graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, started his business in Shenzhen in the early eighties making cover glass for luxury mechanical watches.
In the early 2000s, Biel Crystal began to explore the use of glass to replace plastic covers of mobile phones. The company made a major breakthrough in 2004 when it received an order for 1 million cover glasses for Motorola's Razr flip phones.
Biel Crystal was the world's largest smart device enclosure and module solution provider by shipment value in 2020, with a market share of 17.6 percent, the company said in its prospectus, citing a report by Frost & Sullivan.
With more than 74,000 staff, Biel Crystal operates eight production bases in Shenzhen and Huizhou in Guangdong province, Inner Mongolia, as well as Vietnam. It is also planning to establish a new production base in Grenchen, Switzerland at a cost of 6 million Swiss francs (HK$51.2 million). The plant will supply sapphire covers and cases for luxury watches, and is expected to launch operations in or around June this year.
Biel Crystal produces cover glass, touch screens, optical glass for smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, AR and VR glasses as well as for automobiles. Nearly 70 percent of its revenue came from smartphones followed by 13.6 percent from the wearables segment.
Its revenue rose 8.9 percent to HK$29.91 billion for the year ended last March, as the Covid-19 pandemic was gradually brought under control. However, it was still 5.4 percent below the pre-pandemic level in 2019. Net profit jumped 70.8 percent to HK$3.16 billion.
The gross profit margin climbed 2.2 percentage points to 27.2 percent last financial year, as it accelerated the adoption of smart automation in production.
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Biel Crystal heavily depends on a few big customers. More than 82 percent of its revenue came from its top five customers in the past three years. The top two clients, including Apple, together contributed 70.3 percent of its income in the last financial year, up from 60 percent two years ago. And the largest customer alone accounted for 56 percent of total revenue last year.
Biel Crystal initially planned to sell shares in Hong Kong at the end of 2016 after its biggest competitor Lens Technology went public in Shenzhen. But the plan was delayed several times since then, after Apple's sales fell sharply in 2018 due to competition and Sino-US trade tensions.
The iPhone maker posted record sales of US$123.9 billion in the holiday quarter ended December 25 last year, beating estimates amid the global chips shortage.
Biel Crystal will use some of the proceeds to develop new materials, technologies, businesses and smart manufacturing and automotive fields, and the rest to improve environmental, social, and governance standards, as well as settle part of the dividend payable to the founder couple.
