THE UK FINANCIAL SECTOR was shocked today to learn that the US$50 billion fashion giant Shein will list on the thriving Hong Kong stock market rather than London. 英國金融界今天震驚地獲悉，市值 500 億美元的時尚巨頭 Shein 將在蓬勃發展的香港股市而不是倫敦上市.

Regulators from China, where Shein was founded, gave the thumbs-down to the London market, Reuters reported.

The move is a crushing blow to London, which has been struggling to find listings—but is an extra boon to Hong Kong, which is on the way back to the top of the IPO charts. The southern Chinese city just hosted the stock market debut of global batterymaker CATL, which raised US$4.5 billion in the world’s largest IPO this year.

POLITICAL INTRUSIONS
The whole Shein listing story is a classic tale of how people running successful global businesses can be knocked off track by problems in the political-media sector.

Shein, founded in China, was the textbook example of the positive side of capitalism’s competition principle, cutting prices to the bone and working hard to rise from nowhere to becoming the global leader in fast fashion.

To protect itself from western political-media hostility, it moved its head office to Singapore, and in 2022, was set to arrange a New York listing.

But in 2023, the US political-media sector pushed the discredited Uyghur “genocide/ slave labor” narrative to make the company unwelcome—to the horror of Wall Street players, a number of whom had visited China and knew that the narrative was false.

At the end of 2023, the wrongfully-defamed Shein abandoned New York and decided to shift its listing plan to the London stock market, to the delight of financial leaders there.

MEDIA HIDES FUNDING
But in June of 2024, a group called Stop Uyghur Genocide demanded the business be ejected from London.

The media reported the story but failed to inform its audience about the group’s close connections with the World Uyghur Congress and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, both of which are China-demonization groups largely financed by a CIA spin-off called the National Endowment for Democracy.

UK finance chief Rachel Reeves, knowing that the genocide narrative was a false one circulated by Americans, chose to disregard it, and cleared Shein for a London listing in 2025.

HEADING TO HONG KONG
But earlier this month, Reuters reported that Shein had cut its contacts with its London communications firms, indicated that the listing was off; more political pressure, but this time from China.

So yesterday the news agency said, quoting company officials, that the world’s biggest listing would be in Hong Kong later this year.

It now looks inevitable that Hong Kong will regain its crown as the world’s favorite spot for stock market launches, ahead of New York and London.