SHEIN website (freepik photo, from the shein website)
The online fashion retailer Shein is expected to raise around $2 billion in a new funding round to be held this month, Reuters reported today (Thursday). According to the report, the Chinese company intends to make an IPO in the US in the second half of the year.
Among the main investors in this round are Mubadallah, the sovereign wealth fund of the Emirates, the private equity firm General Atlantic and the venture capital group Sequoia Capital China (Sequoia Capital China) and Tiger Global Management became a new investor, sources told Reuters.
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The report also said that Shane lowered its valuation to $64 billion in the battle fundraising round, a drop of one-third from the round it conducted a year ago.
Last month, the company held initial talks with several investment banks that advised it in preparation for a planned initial public offering (IPO) in the US.
Meshin stated in response that at this stage they have no plans for an IPO and refused to comment beyond that.
Last year, the company informed investors that it was considering turning its website into a trading platform that would allow third-party merchants to sell through it directly to customers.
“The marketplace platform will enable a variety of new commodities and trading options, and we expect it to lead to higher customer engagement and satisfaction,” the announcement read, according to a Wall Street Journal report at the time.
The mention of “a variety of goods” may indicate an intention not only to allow clothing companies to sell through the site, but also to companies from other fields – which will make it a direct competitor to AliExpress and Amazon, where you can order anything.
At the beginning of 2021, the company, which was founded in China, moved its headquarters to Singapore, and since then it has expanded from only five people to about 100. Other activities of the company, such as production and warehouses, are also in the process of decentralization and exit from China, which currently supplies most of the goods to Xi’an – and especially the Guangdong province in the south of the country, where it has more than 3,000 suppliers. Thus, last summer it also started producing in Turkey and rented warehouses in Poland to hold goods for fast delivery to Europe.
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