Ant Financial has flirted with the IPO idea a few times in the past. It did so again recently. We get an unusual interest in it and have received questions about how to subscribe to the IPO. It isn’t confirmed yet! For all we know, they may delay the IPO again. We do not have the financials and an IPO price to determine the deal is a reasonable one but we can conduct some qualitative analysis by looking at the history and the business model of Ant Financial.

How it started

The story was that eBay entered China and dominated the C2C e-commerce market after acquiring Eachnet in 2003. Jack Ma wanted to compete and win. Alibaba was focused on B2B and Taobao was launched to move into the C2C space. But it wasn’t easy to get the transactions going because the buyers and sellers were not familiar with this new way of commerce....