Hong Kong suffered yet another blow in its attempt to attract big-ticket listings on its stock exchange this year after Anheuser-Busch InBev last week decided to pull the plug on the spinoff of its Asian business.
Similar to many withdrawn initial public offerings, the Belgian brewing giant released a statement claiming that the decision to cancel Budweiser APAC’s HK$76.4 billion $9.8 billion IPO, which could have been the world’s largest this year, was partly due to prevailing market conditions.
However, while market conditions may be partially to blame, the situation may have been avoided by better managing investor demand and pricing expectations.
...