BlueCity Trends Upwards on Opening Day of Trading
BlueCity Holdings, the parent company of social app Blued, has had a positive day of trading after debuting on the Nasdaq market yesterday.
The Beijing-based company raised just under $85 million from its IPO, giving it a market value of approximately $614 million.
The initial value of a share was $16, but this figure quickly doubled and peaked at $33.84. However, the price plateaued at around $23 and closed with an opening day increase of 46.44%.
There were concerns about BlueCity’s entry into the US-based stock exchange following comments by the country’s Secretary of State. Mike Pompeo had requested tighter restrictions for publicly-traded Chinese companies.
According to Reuters, Blued’s founder and CEO Ma Baoli expressed in an opening interview: “We have faith in making the local government and regulator trust us. We are capable of conforming to local governments’ regulation requirements. We store overseas customers’ data overseas out of security concerns and retrieval speed.”
Competitor Grindr was recently taken over by San Vicente Acquisition at the request of the US government. It was concerned that previous owners Kunlun Tech Group posed a national security risk due to its ties with the Chinese government.
Blued is one of the world’s biggest LGBTQ dating platforms with over six million monthly active users.
It has a major presence in India, another country that has recently opposed Chinese-owned apps. Last week, 59 products were banned from the Indian app stores, including TikTok and WeChat, because of a military conflict at the India-China border.
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