Is the tea bubble bursting? ChaPanda shares plunge in Hong Kong IPO
CNN
Shares in Chinese bubble tea chain Sichuan Baicha Baidao failed to pop during their market debut Tuesday, tumbling as much as 38% from their listing price.
Shares in Chinese bubble tea chain Sichuan Baicha Baidao failed to pop during their market debut Tuesday, tumbling as much as 38% from their listing price. The company, also known as Chabaidao or ChaPanda, had priced its shares at $17.50 Hong Kong dollars ($2.23) apiece, but they plunged as low as $10.80 Hong Kong dollars ($1.38) in the first two hours of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange. ChaPanda’s shares closed nearly 27% down at $12.80 Hong Kong dollars ($1.63). The company is China’s third-largest retailer of freshly made tea drinks, it said in its IPO prospectus, citing data from market research consultancy Frost & Sullivan. It operates mainly via franchises and has established a network of more than 8,000 stores since opening its first in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 2008. It said it intended to use the money raised from the listing to strengthen its supply chain and digitize its operations, among other plans. Bubble tea (also called “black pearl tea” or “boba tea”) originated in Taiwan in the 1980s, but has since found millions of devotees around the world. Though there are dozens of variations, the essential ingredients are tea, milk and bubbles — little balls made of anything from tapioca to fruit jelly.
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.
At her first White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made an unusual claim about inflation that has stung American shoppers for years: Leavitt said egg prices have continued to surge because “the Biden administration and the department of agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.”