On the evening of April 7, according to Bloomberg, the fresh food distribution platform backed by Tencent was discussing with consulting agencies about preparing to go public. The IPO may be carried out as early as this year. Although the negotiation is still at the immature stage, the planned financing amount is at least USD 500 million – but might stretch higher, to USD 1 billion.
MissFresh has previously disclosed ten rounds of financing, with a total amount of nearly CNY 15 billion. The latest round was CNY 2 billion, in December 2020, led by a joint investment entity comprising Qingdao Guoxin, Sunshine Venture Capital, and Qingdao Municipal Government Guidance Fund.
MissFresh is not the only fresh e-commerce platform seeking to be listed. Its competitors Dingdong and Meicai were purported to be considering IPOs in the US with a fund-raising amount of at least USD 300 million. Meanwhile, the online supermarket chain firm Dmall has hired Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as consultants and aims to acquire capital of USD 500 million through the same mean.
According to people familiar with the matter, the main reason fresh e-commerce companies are flocking to go public is that the cost of fresh e-commerce companies is higher compared with other e-commerce companies due to the enormous cost of fresh products, cold chain, storage, and transportation, so such startups can only burn money as they seek solid foundations in their early stages. Therefore, listing has become an effective means for them to 'refresh' their resources.
Established in 2014, MissFresh is a fresh O2O e-commerce platform, covering fruits, vegetables, seafood, meat, poultry, milk snacks and other categories, and providing customers with the '2-hours til arrival' cold chain distribution service.