The central theses:
- Integrated marketing services provider Era Jade Media, known for its self-produced financial programming, has filed for a fourth Hong Kong IPO
- The company is extremely dependent on its CEO, who was responsible for 64.6% of the company’s revenue in the first half of this year
By Tina Yip
His name may be unfamiliar to most Westerners, but Ma Hongman is practically synonymous with investing in China. And even the many Chinese who don’t know Ma’s real name may remember his internet audio finance program “Ma’s Daily Talk,” which over time has attracted over 1 billion views, has 5.8 million subscribers, and averages over 300,000 views per result.
Ma, who has a PhD in political economy from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, also happens to be the CEO of Era Jade Media Ltd.an integrated marketing services provider that has just filed its fourth IPO application in Hong Kong in the last three years, with Innovax Capital as sole sponsor.
After his preliminary prospectus submitted last week Era Jade Media has original content creation as its core business. It derives its revenue from four sources: video program marketing services; offline PR and other marketing services; marketing services for new media content; and ad placement services. To date, the company has produced and released 12 video programs for broadcast on various TV networks and produced 28 audio programs for broadcast on the online audio platforms Ximalaya FM and Dragonfly FM.
But the company’s revenue hasn’t always been as stable as the volume of the shows it produces. Instead, the figure is quite volatile, falling from 83 million yuan ($11.9 million) in 2019 to 78.76 million yuan in 2020, before recovering to 93.3 million yuan last year before then in the first half of this year to fall to only 6.08 million yuan. The company blamed the recent dive on filming delays caused by the resurgence of Covid-19 in China, including the largest outbreak that has seen the entire city…
