OneConnect, the financial services unit of Chinese insurance giant Ping An (PIAIF), downsized its public offering in the United States on Wednesday. The company set a new price range of $9 to $10 per share, according to an SEC filing. That's down from the $12 to $14 range it had set earlier.
It now wants to raise up to $260 million by selling 26 million shares — nearly half of the original $504 million it had hoped to reap selling 36 million shares.
The offering values OneConnect at between $3.2 billion and $3.6 billion, about half of the $7.5 billion Ping An said the unit was worth last year, when it raised $650 million from investors including SoftBank.
The public offering comes as SoftBank (SFTBY) CEO and founder Masayoshi Son's investing style faces growing scrutiny.
Son and his Japanese tech company pumped billions of dollars into WeWork, only to see it scrap a highly anticipated public offering after investors questioned the office-sharing startup's sky-high valuation and management practices under WeWork cofounder and former CEO Adam Neumann.
SoftBank ended up bailing WeWork out with a $9.5 billion rescue plan that valued the company at $8 billion, far lower than its peak of $47 billion.
Jefferies analyst Atul Goyal said in a note this week that OneConnect follows the same pattern as WeWork, where SoftBank and its Vision Fund were the sole or main investors in the last few funding rounds, driving higher valuations.
If SoftBank continues to inject cash into companies such as OneConnect at inflated valuations, other investors may be scared off. That could leave SoftBank and the Vision Fund as sole or majority investors, "but this will create the specter of [WeWork] all over again," said Goyal.
Other companies in Son's $100 billion Vision Fund portfolio have also been struggling as of late. Shares in Slack (WORK) and Uber (UBER), which both went public earlier this year, are down about 40% from earlier highs.
The declines led SoftBank to report an operating loss of nearly $9 billion for the July-September quarter.
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