The world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev , looks set to pull off one of this year’s biggest initial public offerings—and the biggest outside of the U.S., raising $5 billion for the Hong Kong IPO of its Asian unit.
The public debut of Budweiser Brewing Company APAC Ltd will be the second-biggest IPO in the world so far this year, behind Uber’s $8.1 billion valuation raised in May. that 1.45 billion shares of Budweiser stock will debut on September 30, at HK$27 per share—giving it a market value of $45.6 billion.
The brewer relaunched the Budweiser IPO just two months after scrapping original plans for a bigger public listing, which was. The $5 billion raised on Monday is at the bottom of the originally marketed HK$27-HK$30 valuation range. Budweiser also confirmed that it had managed to secure a cornerstone investor for the IPO : Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC is lined up to invest $1 billion.
Proceeds from the IPO, on which JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley were co-sponsors, will help AB InBev chip away at a debt pile of over $100 billion which the company accumulated afterThe IPO will help revive Hong Kong’s stock market and lend it credibility as an alternative listing hub for new companies going public, especially in the wake of investor uncertainty surrounding the U.S.-China trade war as well as the political protests in Hong Kong itself.