Lulu Yilun Chen
3 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Jack Ma-backed Ant Group Co.’s international division generated nearly $3 billion in revenue for 2024, according to people familiar with the matter, setting the stage for a spinoff after the unit set up its own board last year.
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Ant International, which is headquartered in Singapore, has also produced two consecutive years of adjusted profit, the people said, requesting not to be named because the information isn’t public.
It isn’t clear how the company calculates its adjusted Ebitda, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but the metric typically strips out non-recurring costs, restructuring charges and other items.
The group as a whole grew profits by 61% in 2024 to 38.3 billion yuan ($5.3 billion), according to Bloomberg calculations based on filings from its affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Its latest revenue was not disclosed. Hangzhou-based Ant owns Alipay, a widely used digital payments app and financial services provider in China.
Ant Group didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Ant International has been making inroads into Southeast Asia and expanding its business scope. It’s been a key unit for Ant Group, which has been trying to bolster revenue growth by investing heavily into artificial intelligence and overseas.
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The global unit could fetch an initial public offering valuation of anywhere between $8 billion to $24 billion if it were to list in Hong Kong, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Francis Chan and Sharnie Wong said in a note earlier this month.
They based that on the assumption that Ant International’s profit share is 20% of the entire group, which is estimated to be worth $40 billion to $119 billion.
The international arm initially catered to Chinese tourists traveling outside the country by enabling them to use Alipay to make payments abroad. That service has since expanded into a backbone for cross-border payments known as Alipay+ that can be used by other digital wallets.
For example, when customers of GCash from the Philippines travel to South Korea, they can make payments with their regular app when they see the Alipay+ logo displayed at merchants. Alipay+ currently connects 1.7 billion user accounts across 36 digital wallets.
