Chinese snack retailer Busy Ming surges 75pc in Hong Kong debut

Busy Ming (1768) shares jumped 75 percent on their Hong Kong trading debut on Wednesday, after the Chinese snack and beverage retailer raised HK$3.67 billion in an initial public offering.

The shares opened at HK$445 each, 88.1 percent higher than their offer price of HK$236.60. They fell back to about HK$414, giving Busy Ming a market capitalisation of around HK$89.2 billion.

Busy Ming sold 15.5 million shares in the IPO at the top end of a marketed range, versus an initially offered 14.1 million shares. The retail portion of the sale was nearly 1,900 times oversubscribed while the institutional portion was 44.44 times.

The company plans to use IPO proceeds for supply-chain improvement and product development, as well as to upgrade its store network and support franchisees.

The listing comes as Hong Kong attracts a steady stream of Chinese consumer, food and technology firms. Recent offerings and upcoming debuts include beverage maker Eastroc, pork producer Muyuan Foods, and chipmakers Montage Technology and Axera Semiconductor.

Busy Ming was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Changsha in Hunan province. It described itself in its IPO prospectus as China’s largest snack and beverage chain retailer by sales value in 2024, citing consultancy Frost & Sullivan.

Busy Ming runs stores under the “Busy for You” and “Super Ming” brands, selling products such as biscuits, instant meals and drinks through a mainly franchised retail model.

It prices products about 25 percent below the average of comparable supermarket offerings, Frost & Sullivan said in the prospectus.

At September-end, it had 19,517 stores across 28 provinces, about 59 percent of which were in smaller towns and counties, the prospectus showed.

Revenue rose 75 percent to 46.4 billion yuan (US$6.68 billion) in January-September 2025 versus the same period a year prior. The firm estimated full-year profit of not less than 2.3 billion yuan.

Cornerstone investors include social media and gaming major Tencent, Singapore state investor Temasek, global investment firms BlackRock and FIL Investment, the prospectus showed.

Goldman Sachs and Huatai International were joint sponsors of the IPO.

Reuters