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SINGAPORE (BLOOMBERG) – Dr. Shi Xu once said that financial stability and job security were the two dreams he and his wife had when they moved to Singapore from China in the early 1990s. After almost three decades, they have become billionaires with the inclusion of their company, Nanofilm Technologies International.
The provider of nanotechnology solutions for smartphones and other electronic devices opened at $ 2.77 off its initial public offering price of $ 2.59 per share and was up about 13 percent in early Singapore trading. Dr. Shi’s fortune, comprised primarily of his wife’s 53 percent Nanofilm stake, has risen to nearly $ 880 million (S $ 1.2 billion), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The company declined to comment on the couple’s wealth.
The IPO raised more than $ 470 million, bringing the company’s market value to $ 1.9 billion and marking the highest primary listing on the Singapore Stock Exchange since 2017, excluding real estate investment trusts, for which the city-state it is a global hub. It joins the growing list of tech-related startups that have multiplied there in the last decade.
“Nanofilm is a rare technology manufacturing IPO at SGX in recent years, bringing a fresh perspective to local investors,” said Margaret Yang, Strategist at DailyFX. With computers and wearable devices as its main revenue drivers and more than 70 percent of sales coming from China, the company will benefit from growing demand for digital devices amid Covid-19, he said. “It may attract other locally incubated tech companies to consider listing at home,” he added.
Dr. Shi, 56, founded Nanofilm in 1999 with $ 300,000. It started as a spin-off technology startup from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, where he served as an associate professor, after Japanese conglomerate Hitachi sought to adopt Dr. Shi’s coating technology on its hard drives. When NTU decided to create a company to commercialize the technology, the school asked him to run it. Dr. Shi said in an interview with a local magazine in 2018 that he was “‘forced’ to go into business” and initially negotiated to take a two-year unpaid leave from the university as a backup plan.
Nanofilm now has more than 1,400 employees in offices in Singapore, Japan, China and Vietnam. Its revenue increased more than 40 percent in the first half of the year, after growing 16 percent in 2019, according to its IPO prospect. While the company’s main clients include Fuji Xerox, Microsoft and Huawei Technologies, it noted that reliance on its largest client, a technology company it did not disclose, could be a risk factor: it generated more than half of sales. from last year.
The 13 core investors in the offering include Aberdeen Standard Investments (Asia), Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Asset Management (Singapore) and Venezio Investments, a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings. Temasek itself will be a major shareholder upon completion of the listing and sale of the key shares, the prospectus showed.
The former professor has no regrets about leaving academic life, which his wife, Jin Xiao Qun, considered an “iron rice bowl,” or a stable, according to a Chinese saying. She is the assistant vice president of the company.
“Business is much more challenging compared to teaching,” Dr. Shi told The Peak magazine in 2018. “If you asked me to come back, I might get bored.”
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