As expected, Tencent Music Entertainment Group, the largest music-streaming company in China, has officially filed for an initial public offering in the U.S.
In an F-1 filing Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company set a placeholder amount of $1 billion to indicate the size of the IPO and applied to list on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ Global Market under the symbol “TME.” The company recently cut its plan to raise $4 billion in half, and is now seeking $2 billion.
The filing shows that in the first half of 2018, the company’s revenues grew to around $1.3 billion and its gross profit increased from 1.4 billion yuan to 3.48 billion (around $525 million). The company’s profit after tax was around $250 million.
Parent company Tencent owns 58% of its Music Entertainment Group, while Spotify owns 9.1% due to a “stock swap” between the two companies that took place late last year.
According to the prospectus, both Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have acquired shares in the company for approximately $200 million in cash; Music Business Worldwide first reported that news. The two companies have divided a total of 68,131,015 ordinary shares in TME. Universal is not mentioned as a shareholder.
Both companies saw a mighty profit when selling off Spotify shares in the wake of the streaming giant’s public listing in April. Warner ended up selling 100% of its shares and realizing $504 million, while Sony Music sold approximately 50% of its shares for an estimated $750 million, the company revealed in a public filing in May. Universal Music Group has not sold its Spotify shares, perhaps in anticipation of parent company Vivendi’s plan to sell 50% of that business unit.