With the stock market basically at an all-time high, there are three hot-ticket issues merging into one today. How does the lottery, China and an initial public offering sound? 500.com Ltd. (NYSE: WBAI) has come public on Friday. We would caution readers to look closely at the details because it is not something that you can just say “I just want the China lottery IPO” about, at least not without doing some due diligence.
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24/7 Wall St. has covered the grand lottery winnings in the U.S. this year in depth, and we even came up with a 12-step plan of what to do (and not do) if you win the lottery.
The site 500.com is an online sports lottery service provider in China. The company priced 5,786,000 American Depositary Shares (ADSs) at $13.00 apiece. This comes to $75.2 million in total, or more if the underwriters exercise their overallotment option.
Deutsche Bank Securities was the sole bookrunner in the offering. Co-managers were listed as Piper Jaffray and Oppenheimer. These underwriters have an option to purchase up to 867,900 additional shares at the IPO price within 30 days.
Note that each ADS represents 10 A shares locally. Each Class A ordinary share will be entitled to one vote per share, and each Class B ordinary share will be entitled to 10 votes per share and will be convertible at any time into one Class A ordinary share. Be advised:
- Holders of the Class B ordinary shares will hold 264,761,553 Class B ordinary shares, or 82.1% of the combined total of the outstanding Class A and Class B ordinary shares and this representing 97.9% of the total voting rights in the company.
This online sports lottery service provider in China is represented as having the largest market share in the six months ended June 30, 2013, and the second largest market share in 2012 in terms of purchase amount of sports lottery products. The company aggregates and processes lottery purchase orders from its registered user accounts and currently derives substantially all of its revenues from service fees paid by provincial sports lottery administration centers for the purchase orders of sports lottery products. 500.com offers a suite of online lottery services, information, user tools and virtual community venues.
The company does appear to be profitable, but we would point out that revenues did not just escalate endlessly. In RMB terms rather than dollars, the revenues were as follows:
- 157,378,000 in 2010
- 232,332,000 in 2011
- 171,527,000 in 2012
During the first nine months of the year they were as follows:
- 130,736,000 in 2012
- 163,411,000 in 2013
After pricing at $13.00, the shares opened at $20.00 and were at $21.05 at 9:57 a.m. EST.
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