Landmark Singapore IPO turns professor into multimillionaire

Shi Xu moved to Singapore in the early 1990s, hoping for financial stability and job security. Now the former academic and his wife are multimillionaires after their nanotechnology company debuted in the city-state.

Nanofilm Technologies International Ltd., which provides solutions for smartphones and other electronics, opened at S$2.77 ($2.03) from its initial public offering price of S$2.59 a share and rose as much as 17% before closing up 12%. Shi’s fortune, mainly made up of the 53% Nanofilm stake he holds with his wife, has surged to $916 million, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The company declined to comment on the couple’s wealth.

The IPO raised more than S$470 million, taking the company’s market value to S$1.9 billion and marking the largest primary listing on the Singapore exchange since 2017 excluding real estate investment trusts, for which the city-state is a global hub. It adds to the growing list of tech-related startups that have mushroomed there in the past decade.

“Nanofilm is a rare technology manufacturing IPO on SGX in recent years, bringing a fresh perspective for local investors,” said Margaret Yang, a strategist at DailyFX. With computers and wearable devices its main revenue drivers and more than 70% of sales coming from China, the company is set to benefit from the growing demand for digital devices amid Covid-19, she said. “It may attract other locally-incubated tech firms to consider listing at home,” she added.

Shi, 56, is originally from China and founded Nanofilm in 1999 with $300,000. It started as a tech startup spun off from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, where he worked as an associate professor, after Japanese conglomerate Hitachi sought to adopt Shi’s coating technology to its hard-disk drives. As NTU decided to create a company to commercialize the technology, the school asked him to lead it. Shi said in an interview with a local magazine in 2018 that he was “‘forced’ to go into business” and initially negotiated to take no-pay leave from the university for two years as a backup plan.

Now Nanofilm has more than 1,400 employees in offices in Singapore, Japan, China and Vietnam. Its revenue climbed more than 40% in the first half of the year, after growing 16% in 2019, according to its IPO prospectus. While the firm’s main customers include Fuji Xerox Co., Microsoft Corp. and Huawei Technologies Co., it noted that the reliance on its largest client, a tech company it didn’t disclose, could be a risk factor -- it generated more than half of last year’s sales.

The offering’s 13 cornerstone investors include Aberdeen Standard Investments (Asia) Ltd., Credit Suisse AG, JPMorgan Asset Management (Singapore) Ltd. and Venezio Investments Pte., a wholly owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings Pte. Temasek itself will be a substantial shareholder following the completion of the listing and sale of cornerstone shares, the prospectus showed.

The former professor has no regrets for leaving the academic life, which his wife, Jin Xiao Qun, viewed as an “iron-rice bowl” -- or stable, as per a Chinese saying. She is the company’s assistant vice president.

“Business is so much more challenging, compared to teaching,” Shi told The Peak magazine in 2018. “If you asked me to go back, I might feel bored.”