With no comment forthcoming from the company, we can still confirm that rumors suggest the company is working with financial advisers and plans to raise as much as USD 500 million from the IPO.
The news about the Meicai IPO was published by International Financing Review (Refinitiv), on May 11.
Founded by former astronomer Liu Chuanjun, Meicai went online in 2014. It is a B2B e-commerce website focusing on agricultural products, vegetables and fruits, which adopts the F2B (farmer to buyer) mode – that is, with an efficient cold chain logistics network as the intermediate foundation, farmers are connected with merchants and consumers.
To date, the Beijing-based platform has completed eight rounds of financing, with a total amount of over USD 1.5 billion. The most recent financing was USD 800 million backed by Hillhouse capital and tiger global management in October 2018.
As of February 2021, according to the company, it had laid out in more than 200 cities across China, with 150 logistics centers, daily processing of more than 5 million packages, more than 20000 distribution vehicles and 35000 employees. It has provided one-stop, all-category catering raw material procurement services for about 10 million restaurants and vegetable shops in China.
In recent years, with the gradual change of the mode of consumers purchasing fresh goods, the business volume of fresh e-commerce has greatly improved, and the business model has gradually matured. According to Fastdata, in the first half of 2020, the transaction volume of fresh e-commerce reached CNY 182.12 billion, up 137.6% year-on-year; fresh e-commerce monthly live users exceeded 71 million, a year-on-year increase of 75.4%.