Up 489% year-over-year! Hong Kong stock IPO financing nearly HKD 1,100 billion in the first quarter

In Q1 2026, the IPO financing pace in the Hong Kong stock market (HK IPOs) has not slowed down.

So is the speed of IPO filings. In Q1, there were 192 new IPO applications for listings on the Main Board and GEM of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited (HKEX). This hot momentum continues: on the latest disclosed date, April 2, 14 companies submitted Hong Kong IPO applications on the same day and updated their prospectuses.

Among them, mainland-funded securities firms still maintain an advantage in the sponsor business. In Q1, the top three in Hong Kong IPO sponsorship deal counts were CICC Hong Kong, CITIC Securities (Hong Kong), and Huatai Financial Holdings (Hong Kong). International investment banks such as UBS and Morgan Stanley followed closely.

The rankings of the top three investment banks by sponsorship deals remain stable

In the first quarter of 2026, a total of 40 companies were listed on HKEX, raising nearly 110 billion Hong Kong dollars in IPO proceeds, up 489% year over year.

In terms of the number of sponsorship deals, the ranking of the top three sponsor banks remains stable, continuing the seating arrangement from 2025.

Among them, CICC Hong Kong continued to firmly rank No. 1 with 15 IPO sponsorship deals; CITIC Securities (CITIC Hong Kong—calculated by combining CITIC with CITIC and adding CLSA) and Huatai Financial Holdings (Hong Kong) sponsored 7 deals each, tying for second place; UBS, Morgan Stanley, Guotai Junan, and China Merchants Securities (Hong Kong) sponsored 4 deals each, tying for third place.

In 2025, CICC Hong Kong, CITIC Securities (Hong Kong), and Huatai Financial Holdings (Hong Kong) sponsored 42, 33, and 22 Hong Kong IPOs, respectively, ranking among the top three, and their cumulative market share reached 37%.

From the financing amount of individual projects, multiple IPO companies raised more than 5 billion Hong Kong dollars, including Muyuan Co., Ltd., Eastroc Beverage, Zhipu, Will Semiconductor, Birun Technology, and GigaDevice, among others. IPOs with financing of over 10 billion Hong Kong dollars were mostly industry-leading A+H share companies; in terms of industry distribution, among the newly listed IPO companies, companies in sectors such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotechnology accounted for the majority.

In terms of audit-firm rankings, the market-share concentration among leading companies is even higher than that of sponsors. According to Wind statistics, the firm ranked first is Ernst & Young Hua Ming with 18 deals. Second is KPMG with 9 deals; and Deloitte Hong Kong, Gordon G. Huang & Chen Fang with 5 deals. The top three audit firms together account for 80% of the market share.

In terms of law-firm distribution, concentration is slightly more dispersed. The top three law firms are Beijing Tongshang Law Firm, Highwill Shine? Law Firm, and Beijing Jingtian Gongcheng Law Firm. The number of signed Hong Kong IPO deals is 15, 14, and 12, respectively.

Hong Kong IPO reform and market heat continue

HK IPOs are strengthening regulatory oversight of the quality of filing documents. However, since 2026, the pace and heat of new share submissions, reviews, and listings have still been maintained. Recently, HKEX also plans to carry out reforms to the new share issuance system. It is expected that this year’s HK IPO financing amount will very likely exceed last year’s, and it will change the structure and composition of Hong Kong listed companies. (For details, see Securities Times’ report on the “four major new trends for Hong Kong IPOs in 2026.”)

Since 2018, when Hong Kong IPO reform allowed dual-class-share listings and listings of loss-making biotech companies, the structural composition of HK listed companies has been fundamentally reshaped, and a large number of special technology and medical biotech companies have gone public in Hong Kong.

On March 15, HKEX proposed another reform to the listing regime. It plans to lower the valuation and financial thresholds for dual-class-share companies, and the maximum ratio of different voting rights can be as high as 20:1. It will also optimize the rules for secondary listings to facilitate offshore issuers listing in Hong Kong. It will allow all new enterprises planning to IPO to submit confidential filings, while also strengthening the mechanism for returning submissions: incomplete materials returned will have their intermediary institutions—such as sponsors, law firms, and accounting firms—disclosed. (For details, see Securities Times’ report “HKEX to introduce ‘new listing rules’, with maximum dual-class voting ratio 20:1, fully opening up confidential submissions.”)

In this year’s first quarter, HKEX received 192 IPO applications for the Main Board and GEM. As of the end of Q1, HKEX had 413 IPO companies under review, and another 99 had their reviews paused due to expired financial reports. Together with the unprocessed filing applications from last year, the total number of IPO applications reached 568.

(Source: Securities Times)