[News Inside] Soaring 23% on First Day of Listing... Scholar Who Became a Billionaire Overnight

Tang Xiaoou, Founder of SenseTime

▲Tang Xiaoou, founder of SenseTime

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jaehee] A scholar who had only been conducting research suddenly became a billionaire.

This is the story of Tang Xiaowu, the founder of SenseTime, a Chinese information technology (IT) company famous for facial recognition technology.

SenseTime, the largest artificial intelligence (AI) company in China, was blacklisted by the United States over human rights violation allegations, causing its stock market listing to be canceled. Afterwards, it shifted its focus to the Hong Kong stock market and debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on the 30th of last month. The initial public offering (IPO) price per share was 3.85 Hong Kong dollars, and during trading, it surged by 23.12% compared to the IPO price, reaching 4.74 Hong Kong dollars. As a result, the market capitalization increased to approximately 33.3 billion Hong Kong dollars (about 5.06 trillion Korean won).

Bloomberg evaluated, "Since July, when Chinese authorities began enforcing overseas listing regulations in earnest, the average first-day stock price increase for Chinese companies was only about 1%," adding, "SenseTime's sharp rise is very unusual."

With SenseTime’s IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, attention is also focused on Tang Xiaowu (53), one of the company’s founders. Tang is the largest shareholder, holding 21% of SenseTime’s shares.

Regarded as a global authority in the field of image recognition, Tang Xiaowu earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology of China. He then attended the University of Rochester in New York and obtained his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1996. Currently a professor of information engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Professor Tang is an expert in underwater robotics and computer vision, and has long dedicated himself to developing artificial intelligence (AI) necessary for facial recognition.

Professor Tang worked for several years at Microsoft (MS) Research Asia and co-founded SenseTime in Shanghai in 2014 with Xu Li, who was then a researcher at Lenovo Group, a Chinese computer manufacturer. Xu Li had been Tang’s doctoral student advisor during his Ph.D. studies, and after completing his doctorate, he started the company with Tang. The AI team led by Professor Tang already surpasses the research achievements of global companies such as Google and Facebook.

Originally, SenseTime was scheduled to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on the 17th, but the U.S. Treasury Department added the company to a blacklist on the 10th restricting investments related to human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, delaying the listing by about two weeks.

Through this offering, SenseTime issued 1.5 billion new shares at a price range of 3.85 to 3.99 Hong Kong dollars per share, raising 5.775 billion Hong Kong dollars.

Although many U.S. investors withdrew due to the American sanctions, the shares were taken over by the Chinese government’s strategic industry development fund and several state-owned enterprises, maintaining the overall scale of the listing.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.