China Mobile aims to raise up to £6.6 billion in Shanghai listing

China Mobile is hoping to raise 56 billion yuan (£6.6 billion) as it plans to list itself in China, a year after laws introduced by the Trump administration removed the company from the New York Stock Exchange.

The company, which is the world’s largest mobile network operator by number of subscribers, is set to sell shares publicly in Shanghai, it announced on its Weibo account. Each share will cost 57.58 yuan and the results of the listing will be published on 28 December.

If the company raises up to 56 billion yuan, it will make the public share sale China’s fifth-biggest on record, according to Reuters. It would also be the country’s biggest listing since the Agricultural Bank of China’s public offering in 2010.

The company said the money from the listing would be used to invest in projects like 5G networks, infrastructure for cloud resources, and intelligent ecosystems.

Following rising tensions between China-US relations, China Mobile was removed from the New York Stock Exchange, along with China Telecom and Unicom, at the end of 2020 following an executive order issued by the Trump administration. The Exchange cited an executive order that prevented US citizens from investing in companies linked to the Chinese military.

In the same month, the FCC also ordered certain telecoms companies to remove Huawei equipment from their networks as part of the process of revoking China Telecom’s authorisation to operate in the US. The decision was taken based on concerns surrounding Huawei and China Telecom’s alleged ties to the Chinese government.

This approach hasn’t been changed by the current president Joe Biden and, in October this year, the FCC then went on to order China Telecom to stop providing domestic interstate and international communication services in the US, saying it was safeguarding the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure from potential security threats.

This was followed a month later by the US Department of Commerce adding dozens of Chinese tech companies to its trade blacklist to prevent the country’s army from gaining access to critical US technologies. Eight of them specialise in quantum computing technologies, sparking concerns China could leverage them in breaking US encryption or developing unbreakable encryption for the Chinese army.