The Zeekr electric premium car brand of Geely wants to raise more than $1 billion through an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.
Unnamed sources claim that Zeekr has confidentiality filed for an IPO and is seeking a valuation of more than $10 billion. It could go public as early as the second quarter of 2023 and had pondered an IPO in Hong Kong but concluded listing in New York could lead to a higher valuation.
Geely’s high-end electric car brand wants to establish itself as a rival to the likes of Tesla and Nio. Its first model is the sleek 001 and in November, it also unveiled its luxurious 009 electric minivan. Word of the IPO comes a couple of months after Geely said it planned to spin off Zeekr but had not yet decided in which market it should go public.
The company was only established by Geely in April 2021 and its listing would be the first major U.S. floatation of a Chinese company in more than 18 months, Auto News notes.
Read: Electric Zeekr 001 Breaks World Record With A Drift At 129 MPH
While Zeekr is still in its infancy, a major round of external fundraising earlier this year gave it a valuation of around $8 billion. In August 2021, it received $500 million in funding from the likes of Intel Capital, CATL, and Bilibili.
Zeekr sold 60,600 cars in the first nine months of 2022 across China, not bad considering the 001 is the only model that it sells, starting at 299,000 yuan ($43,000), making it slightly pricier than the Tesla Model Y.
A host of other models are being planned by Zeekr that will use the innovative Qilin batteries developed by CATL. These batteries are based on CATL’s third-generation CTP technology and can provide an EV with over 621 miles (1,000 km) of range. They are said to deliver 13 per cent more power than Tesla’s 4680 battery cells using the same chemical system and same pack size.
