By Scott Murdoch and Kane Wu
HONG KONG (Reuters) -Shares of China’s Zijin Gold International rose as much as 66% in their Hong Kong trading debut on Tuesday after the company raised $3.2 billion in an initial public offering (IPO), the largest deal of its kind globally in 2025.
The company, a unit of China’s Zijin Mining that operates all of the group’s gold mines outside China, sold 349 million shares at HK$71.59 each.
Zijin Gold shares hit HK$119 before paring some gains to be HK$114.80, still up 60% at 0539 GMT. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index was up 0.1% in afternoon trading.
Zijin Gold is on track to be one of the best-performing IPOs for first day trading in Hong Kong in the past 10 years, according to Dealogic data.
Gold prices hit a record high on Tuesday, having risen 11.4% so far in September, on track for its best month since August 2011. The yellow metal is up about 42% this year on the back of global political uncertainties and lower interest rates around the world.
“For mining enterprises like Zijin Gold in the upstream of the gold industry chain, a sustained high and rising gold price will drive the performance growth, as the rise in gold prices will directly boost its revenue and profits,” said Xinyao Wang, an analyst who publishes on SmartKarma, in a research note Tuesday.
Zijin Mining’s Hong Kong shares rose as much as 8.2% after Zijin Gold’s debut. The company’s Shanghai-listed shares were up 3.7%.
Zijin Gold is the second most actively traded stock by turnover on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Tuesday with 78.6 million shares worth HK$8.9 billion ($1.14 billion) changing hands.
The retail tranche of Zijin Gold’s IPO was 241 times oversubscribed while the institutional tranche was 20.4 times oversubscribed, according to regulatory filings.
So far in 2025, IPOs and secondary listings worth $23.2 billion have taken place in Hong Kong, marking the busiest year since 2021, according to Dealogic data.
The rebound in the city’s capital markets activity comes as booming demand for Chinese artificial intelligence and tech stocks has seen a raft of Chinese companies listed in the mainland also sell shares in Hong Kong.
Zijin Gold’s IPO was the largest in Hong Kong since JD Logistics’ float in May 2021, which raised $3.6 billion, Dealogic data showed. It was the largest deal of its kind in the world this year.
If an overallotment is exercised on the Zijin deal, it would raise $3.7 billion and be the largest since Kuaishou Technology raised $6.2 billion in January 2021.
Zijin Gold said in its prospectus it is planning to use the proceeds over the next five years to upgrade existing mines.
It added that it expects global gold demand to grow steadily at a compound annual growth rate of 3.2% from 2024 to 2030.
($1 = 7.7804 Hong Kong dollars)
(Reporting by Scott Murdoch in Sydney, Kane Wu and Donny Kwok in Hong Kong; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Neil Fullick and Lincoln Feast.)
