Qunar, China's biggest metasearch service and also the country's top travel site by traffic, listed today on the NASDAQ in New York under the symbol QUNR.
At the time of this article, Qunar was trading at $29.8 per share, almost double than what the market is said to have expected. At its current trading price, Qunar is valued at $3.3 billion.
The company filed for initial public offering of 11.1 million American Depository Share (ADS) in September with the expected price range of $9.5 to $11.5 aper share. It had recently increased the initial share price between $12 to $14 a share.
Qunar's IPO is one of the biggest listings by a Chinese company in the US.
Tnooz spoke to the CEO of Qunar, CC Zhuang on its IPO day.
How is the IPO money going to be used?
We will be investing in technology, hiring new talent, and we are also open minded to strategic alliances and acquisition.
There is no specific target company when it comes to acquisition. However, the target company will be in travel industry. The fundamental value of companies changes time by time, technology also changes form time to time, so we will go after the acquisition depending on these.
Why list in NASDAQ?
It is based on Qunar's history, our operation status, and our shareholder structure. US listing is the best pick for the company.
With TTS platform, will Qunar become a full fledged OTA in future?
We are a search-based travel platform, we are not an OTA and we do not intend to be an OTA. We run a different model.
We are fully focused on our initiative of building a big brand, a traffic acquisition platform, at the same time providing the information technology infrastructure for the travel ecosystem.
We will now do the fulfilment, custom service, inventory stocking by ourselves, and provide free IT infrastructure for the whole industry including certain type of auto fulfilment.
When do you think Qunar will turn profitable?
The company is really focused on long term profitability. In the short term, we are more focused on keeping our cash flow balanced. In long run, we should be able to achieve a big profitability if we capture a huge market share in Chinese online travel market.
What innovations we can expect from Qunar?
On our mobile platform, we are continually deploying new technology. We just launched our new version of mobile platform.
We will continually implement new technologies in our desktop and mobile platform to enhance customer experience. [Qunar was one of the two travel apps to be pre-loaded in Samsung Gear - here]
Next 18 months plan?
We are going to add new travel service providers on to our platform, add new product lines, enhance customer experience, also bring in more resources to develop our mobile platform. [Ctrip becoming an MTA from a OTA, eLong's $100 million fund to promote mobile - here]
Plans of serving markets outside China?
We will follow were Chinese travellers go, we follow our consumer closely. Where they go, where we go.
Multilingual site?
At this moment, we are more focused on Chinese consumers for domestic and overseas travel.
Any new revenue streams you are looking at apart from display ads and referral traffic?
We are open minded to all types of revenue streams related to online travel. However, flight and hotel are continually going to be the strongest of two revenue streams for our company.
We will continue to generate revenue from our mobile platform. As on this quarter this year, 14.5% of our revenue has come from our mobile platform, in this the majority is search based revenue.
Moving forward, we are going to continue to generate revenue from mobile and it is going to be increased.
With Baidu holding a controlling stake in Qunar (even after the IPO), do you see this as advantage or disadvantage from Qunar's growth perspective?
We see Baidu as a supporter of us, moving forward, we are going to continually lead the Chinese online travel ecosystem together.
NB: NASDAQ image via Shutterstock.