Tencent Music’s Updated IPO Docs List $1.4B Raise, Record Profit

Morning Markets: Tencent Music filed a new IPO document this week detailing how much money it expects to raise and its most recent results.

This week Tencent Music filed a new document, an F-1/A, updating its financials and providing new notes on how much money the firm expects to raise in its impending listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

When Tencent Music, the Chinese entertainment giant, first filed to go public we noted that it was in strong financial shape. Unlike many companies looking to go public in 2018, the Tencent-backed firm posted both growth and profits. The combination was also in contrast to Spotify, the European music streaming firm, which remains unprofitable amid growth.

The company expects its IPO, underwritten by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche, and BofA Merrill Lynch, to raise as much as $1.41 billion, listing at a price between $13 and $15 per share. (In its IPO, each share sold will be worth two Tencent Music Class A shares, boosting its per-share price but lowering the number of equivalent shares used for calculating certain metrics.)

Notably, about half the shares offered in the IPO (discounting the greenshoe underwriter option) will come from extant shareholders, limiting the amount of capital that Tencent Music itself will raise in its flotation.

But that only matters so much. The company’s quarter ending September 30, 2018, included its largest quarterly profit listed in its filing. Tencent Music’s quarter saw a hair under 5 billion RMB (around $727 million) in revenue, an operating profit of 1.06 billion RMB ($155 million), and post-tax net income of 964 million RMB ($141 million).

The firm grew just over 10 percent from the sequentially preceding quarter and 71 percent from the year-ago quarter. Not bad.

Why Doesn’t It Lose Money?

Tencent Music is profitable, and Spotify isn’t. That might seem odd, but the two firms are far less of product cognates than you might have expected.

The company generated just under 30 percent of its revenue in the first three quarters of 2018 from its “online music services” and just over 70 percent from “social entertainment services and others.” Its “social entertainment” category is comprised of “live streaming, online karaoke, sales of music-related merchandise and certain other services.” That’s not what Spotify does of course.

The Chinese music and entertainment company doesn’t break out its cost of revenues for each revenue category, but I would wager you breakfast that the majority of its margin comes from its larger revenue category.

Regardless of how it makes its money, Tencent Music looks healthy and ready to go. So, while we thought that the IPO season was coming to a close, perhaps we have one more debut to get into 2018. We’ll see.

Illustration: Li-Anne Diass