Six Years, Three Cities, One IPO: SHEIN Finally Lands in Hong Kong

TMTPOST -- SHEIN has finally arrived on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after a journey that spanned six years and three cities.

It debuted on the Hong Kong stock market on Spetember 1. The stock opened at HK$48.56, giving the company a total market capitalization of about HK$200 billion.

From planning a U.S. listing in 2020, to quietly submitting listing materials in London in 2024, to securing approval from the UK Financial Conduct Authority in 2025 only to turn back again, this IPO marathon spanning New York, London, and Hong Kong ran for a full six years—and it finally reached a happy ending.

And as the bell-ringing news broke, how this unicorn steadily grew out of Guangdong’s soil step by step also became the focal point under the spotlight.

Shein's Low-profile Founder and its Fast-Fashion Machine

SHEIN’s story, naturally, has to begin with its founder.

Compared with SHEIN’s household-name status, its founder is relatively unfamiliar to the public because he rarely appears in the spotlight—so many people don’t recognize the name “Xu Yangtian.” But the strength of the post-’80s Xu Yangtian should not be underestimated.

As stated in the prospectus, “Immediately following completion of the Global Offering, our founder, executive director and chief executive officer, Mr. Xu Yangtian, will, through intermediate holding vehicles, hold and control an aggregate of 798,973,148 Class A Shares and 487,090,102 Class B Shares, representing approximately 30.3% of the Company’s issued share capital.”

Based on today’s opening market cap of HK$200 billion, Xu Yangtian’s net worth is around HK$60 billion. That also leaves him, without dispute, firmly seated on the throne of “Zibo’s richest man.”

And tracing it back to the source, SHEIN didn’t start out in Guangzhou either.

Xu Yangtian, who studied International Trade at Qingdao University of Science and Technology, joined a foreign-trade marketing company in Nanjing after graduating in 2007, where he worked on search engine optimization. This experience has often been mentioned since, because SHEIN’s early playbook for acquiring overseas traffic was, to a large extent, born out of it.

In 2008, 24-year-old Xu Yangtian co-founded Nanjing Dianwei Information Technology Co., Ltd. with partners. In its earliest days, the company sold assorted goods such as teapots and mobile phones, before later shifting into apparel. In less than a year, Xu Yangtian took his core team and started again from scratch, moving into cross-border wedding dresses. It just so happened that, at the time, the price advantage of Suzhou’s Huqiu Bridal City, combined with a gap in overseas markets, made the business take off for a period.

The real turning point came in 2011. That year, Xu Yangtian moved the company’s headquarters to Guangzhou; by around 2012, the business focus had also shifted from wedding dresses to women’s fast fashion. Its sourcing channels switched to local wholesale markets in Guangzhou, while customer acquisition relied on overseas social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Looking back, the significance of that choice becomes especially clear. Guangzhou has the country’s most complete apparel supply-chain cluster: from fabrics and sampling to finished garments, everything can be completed in a one-stop process within a radius of just a few dozen kilometers. Panyu’s garment factories, Baiyun’s logistics hub, and the cross-border e-commerce ecosystem spread across the province together formed the foundation of SHEIN’s “small-batch, rapid replenishment” model, enabling it to compress the cycle from design draft to delivery to just 2–3 weeks. This meant that the first run of a new style often produced only 100–200 pieces, which were put online directly to test market response; if it sold well, SHEIN placed additional orders, and if it didn’t, production stopped—trading the lowest possible trial-and-error cost for higher product-selection efficiency.

The milestones show that in 2012, SHEIN launched operations in China, and later introduced the “SHEIN” brand in 2013. The group’s holding company, SHEIN International Holdings Ltd., was formally incorporated on May 12, 2014 under the laws of the Cayman Islands.

This “small-batch, rapid replenishment” playbook also quickly helped SHEIN scale up over the following years, turning it into one of today’s major cross-border e-commerce giants.

Data shows that in 2023, 2024, and 2025, SHEIN’s operating revenue was US$32.1 billion, US$38.748 billion, and US$41.847 billion, respectively, while net profit was US$2.789 billion, US$3.365 billion, and US$2.064 billion, respectively. The prospectus also shows that as of the end of March 2026, SHEIN was serving 273 million active users across roughly 160 markets worldwide, with cumulative orders exceeding 1 billion.

However, the growth curve was not a steady climb. The prospectus disclosed that in the first quarter of 2026, SHEIN swung from profit to loss, posting a net loss of US$99 million, compared with net profit of US$395 million in the same period a year earlier.

Although SHEIN attributed the loss to “a fair value loss of US$328 million on our convertible redeemable preferred shares,” external factors such as tighter tariff policies and geopolitical turbulence drove up raw-material costs, and competition from PDD Holdings’ Temu continued to erode its market share……all of which will be issues SHEIN must confront and resolve as it enters a new phase as a listed company.

Quiet Company, Loud Valuation

“Low-key” is also one of the labels the outside world has placed on SHEIN.

Even though the company rarely speaks out proactively—and its standard response to external rumors has long been “no comment”—the capital markets’ attention has never cooled.

According to the prospectus, SHEIN’s Series A financing agreement was signed on September 16, 2014, and the transaction closed on February 17, 2015. SHEIN issued 9,433,962 ordinary shares to a specific investor at about US$0.5 per share, for total consideration of US$5 million, implying a pre-money valuation of US$53 million. Those shares were later converted into 5,390,091 Series A preferred shares. The Series B financing agreement was signed on April 28, 2016, with closings spanning from June 28, 2018 to August 17, 2020. SHEIN received total proceeds of RMB 169 million, with a pre-money valuation of RMB 1.1 billion and a per-share cost of about RMB 0.36. IDG Capital and GIC were the lead investors in this round.

The Series C financing was signed in two tranches on June 28 and July 5, 2018, with closings continuing through March 29, 2019. At a pre-money valuation of US$2.4 billion, SHEIN issued 7,277,166 Series C preferred shares at about US$33.4 per share, for total consideration of US$243 million. The subsequent Series C+ round was much smaller: it was signed and closed in a single step on March 26, 2020. The pre-money valuation jumped to US$5.0 billion, and SHEIN issued 381,869 Series C+ preferred shares at about US$63.9 per share, for total consideration of just US$24.4 million.

The real valuation leap came in 2022. On January 15 that year, several existing shareholders transferred secondary shares to pre-Series D investors at about US$724.9 per share for total consideration of US$300 million, by which point the pre-money valuation had already been pushed up to US$60.5 billion. Soon after, the Series D financing conducted between February 11 and March 31, 2022 further lifted the pre-money valuation to US$98.2 billion. SHEIN issued 1,547,270 Series D preferred shares at about US$1,186.0 per share, for total cash consideration of roughly US$1.8 billion. Boyu Capital was the largest single investor in this round, investing about US$700 million, accounting for 38% of the round.

Also in 2022, SHEIN’s valuation once came close to US$100 billion, surpassing the combined market capitalizations of H&M and Zara.

However, a turning point emerged not long after 2022. In the Series D+ financing—signed on a rolling basis between April 6 and December 19, 2023, and closed in tranches on May 10 and December 21—the pre-money valuation fell back to US$64.0 billion. SHEIN issued 2,312,161 Series D+ preferred shares at about US$751.03 per share, for total cash consideration of roughly US$1.7 billion. Mubadala Investment Company, General Atlantic, and Sequoia Capital were the main participants in this round.

Putting these seven financing rounds together, it isn’t hard to see that in every round after the Pre-D round, the offer price was at a premium—not a discount—to this IPO pricing. The D round saw the highest premium, reaching 283.4%. That means investors who came in at a valuation of US$98.2 billion are sitting on a very bleak paper loss. The gap is precisely the result of the primary and secondary markets applying different pricing logics to the same company.

SHEIN Is Just the Beginning for Guangzhou

Shifting the spotlight from SHEIN to its home base of Guangzhou, it’s not hard to find that in the capital markets, “Guangzhou” is likewise a low-profile presence.

After all, compared with Beijing’s tech narrative, Shanghai’s financial clout, and Shenzhen’s halo in hard tech, Guangzhou has been far quieter in the public eye in recent years—but being low-key doesn’t mean being less capable.

According to the 2026 Global Unicorn Index released by Hurun Research Institute, the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area had 80 unicorns, including 44 in Shenzhen and 24 in Guangzhou. What does 24 mean? From a global perspective, Guangzhou alone matched an entire country like Canada (24), exceeded Singapore (20), Israel (17), South Korea (16), and Brazil (16), more than doubled the Netherlands (11) and Australia (10), and easily outpaced Japan (9), Spain (4), and Italy (3).

Leaving aside SHEIN, which rang the opening bell today, a look at the remaining 23 unicorns also shows Guangzhou’s considerable strength. Its unicorn footprint has been extending from traditional manufacturing into emerging sectors such as new energy, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence.

More specifically, in new energy vehicles there is GAC Aion, valued at RMB 50 billion; in commercial spaceflight, CAS Space, at RMB 42 billion; in semiconductors, CanSemi at RMB 30 billion and Xinyueneng at RMB 6.8 billion; in gaming, Duoyi Network at RMB 22 billion and Kuro Technology at RMB 11.5 billion; in consumer electronics, Ligan Innovation at RMB 21 billion; in e-commerce, Zhijing Technology at RMB 20.5 billion; in the industrial internet, Rootcloud at RMB 15 billion; in the low-altitude economy, XPENG AeroHT at RMB 13 billion; and in battery swapping for new energy, Aodong New Energy at RMB 12 billion. There is also a cohort of companies including Top Toy, Tanji Tech, Jianai, Zhongxin Seed Industry, China Southern Airlines Logistics, Juwan Technology, HeyGears, Qiandama, Quwan, Yunzhou Biosciences, and XAG, with valuations mostly clustered in the RMB 6.8–9.0 billion range.

Behind this landscape is a capital playbook that leans more toward industrial synergies than chasing the latest hype.

At the industrial-finance level, Guangzhou Financial Holdings Group has made a cluster of funds its primary lever, building a system of “master fund + sub-funds + district-level funds + industry direct-investment funds,” with a total scale exceeding RMB 150 billion. According to figures it has disclosed, this capital force positioned across the Greater Bay Area has invested in 1,208 companies. In 2025, investment in newly added tech projects rose 70% year on year, with key priorities concentrated in strategic emerging industries such as high-end manufacturing, biopharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, and the low-altitude economy. In total, it has nurtured 86 listed companies and 106 unicorns. Specific examples include Montage Technology, Risong Technology, VeriSilicon, Huatong Cable, Jiechuang Intelligent, Guanggang Gas, and Yongsuntai.

At the beginning of this year, Xu Yangtian—who has long rarely appeared in public—spoke as a corporate representative at Guangdong’s High-Quality Development Conference. He noted that since SHEIN established itself in Guangzhou in 2014, it has maintained rapid growth, and that in 2025 the platform’s export value exceeded RMB 100 billion. He said that over the next three years, SHEIN would deeply participate in pilot programs for cross-border e-commerce industrial clusters across Guangdong, helping more small and medium-sized factories share in the dividends of cross-border e-commerce, and that it planned to continue investing in supply-chain enablement and talent development.

At the conference, Xu attributed this growth to Guangdong’s comprehensive industrial ecosystem and a business environment defined by “no unnecessary interference, and responsive support when needed.” “Today, SHEIN has nearly 10,000 partner suppliers in Guangdong, driving employment for more than 600,000 people within the province. Guangdong has truly become the fertile ground for our growth,” he said.

As the largest company on the unicorn list by scale, SHEIN has already successfully rung the bell for its listing on the secondary market. After SHEIN, there will surely be a steady stream of unicorns and “little giants” emerging from Guangzhou’s fertile soil and stepping onto a much broader stage.