The successful stock debut of the pioneer in artificial intelligence and facial recognition had to overcome US sanctions, which look increasingly like a dirty commercial war, waged by a country that can’t compete on tech merits alone
It must be intimidating working or studying at the engineering faculty of the Chinese University of Hong Kong when a colleague or teacher next to you is not only a co-founder of one of the world’s hottest tech companies but also one of Asia’s richest men.
SenseTime, a specialist in artificial intelligence, has had a successful debut in the local stock market. This was despite being slapped with US sanctions which delayed its IPO by several weeks.
That worked out fine, as the company ended up pricing its shares at the low end of the range at HK$3.85 (49 US cents), which no doubt helped boost the juicy price pop during its first days of trading.
Before the IPO, Bloomberg data already pegged Sean Tang Xiao’ou – professor, associate dean and company co-founder – with a net worth of US$3.4 billion. Now, with his more than 20 per cent stake in SenseTime, he is worth even more.
Having talked for more than two decades about turning Hong Kong into a hi-tech hub with little to show for it, the local government finally gets a real high-value pioneer to show off. No wonder Hong Kong’s finance chief Paul Chan Mo-po looked ecstatic at the IPO ceremony. SenseTime CEO Xu Li also holds a doctorate in computer science from CUHK.
Hong Kong once gave Frank Wang Tao, graduate of the University of Science and Technology, the cold shoulder. He ended up founding DJI, the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial drones, across the border in Shenzhen.
The US sanctions must have been like thunder out of nowhere for SenseTime. Suddenly, SenseTime executives were told a subsidiary, though not the parent company with the IPO, had been put on a sanctions list for violating human rights in Xinjiang.
The company has more than 10 per cent of the market share with facial recognition software in China; it would be hard to avoid having its products being used by the Chinese government, including law enforcement agencies in the restive region.
DJI has also been sanctioned by Washington for the same reason. And before that, Huawei Technologies had a global lead on 5G networks, until the US rallied its allies and pressured others to isolate and kill its worldwide business.
It’s all looking like a state-sponsored commercial war, waged by a country that can’t compete properly and so prefers to weaponise human rights or otherwise play dirty.
