One thing I've been thinking about recently is that for Chinese firms, an IPO can be dangerous. Why? Attracting the wrong sort of attention. A quick thread with two examples (Ant is obviously one) 1/n
Ex 1: Qudian, a high interest small loan company that raised nearly $1b USD list October 2017, company then was only 3 years old. It had 7m borrowers and $5.6b in loans at the time of IPO. The secret to its success? Partnership with Alipay, whose user base turbocharged growth 2/n
Chinese authorities were aware so-called "cash loans" (like payday loans in the US) were a fast-growing business w/lot of risk and rampant abusive practices, but it was not until the IPO disclosures that they realized just how big it already was. So they slammed on the brakes 3/n
Almost immediately after IPO comes the crackdown. Authorities slapped big restrictions on cash lending, which rocketed up on the financial risk/regulation agenda. You can see the swift downfall in this share price chart for Qudian 4/n 
Regulators also knew the role Ant played as a flyweel for Qudian's growth, so it got taken down a notch too--the rules, at least for a time, obliterated Ant's main model at the time for funding loans (ABS). 5/n
Fast forward to Ant IPO. Before prospectus, no one except a few people at Ant and perhaps a few regulators knew how large its loan portfolio was, how many borrowers, and scale of many of its other businesses. I research this for a living, and even I barely had a ballpark! 6/n
Why was this so important to what came next? Risks that might be raised internally bottom up at regulators became concrete, quantified, and known to the public, which means they could escalate to higher pol levels and test public opinion 7/n
***IMHO too much is made of Jack Ma's now infamous speech, instead of conditions that led him to gamble on it to fight off new regulations. At the time, info disclosed in IPO prospectus on Ant scale was filtering into regulators/pols, raising pressure for tougher rules. 8/n
In addition to disclosures, Ant achieving an IPO valuation on par with JP Morgan raised alarm bells in Beijing, in which top officials wondered how much of this stratospheric value was "rents" extracted from state banks and monopolistic position thanks to users/platform/data. 9/n
To conclude: there is much talk about the benefits to CN firms of positive state attention (contracts, subsidies, protection), but it is much safer to be 低调 (low profile), even for a hotshot company in China w/ a billion users, than to have your exact scale and biz in the open
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