On November 15, the CDP Group formally submitted an application to the US Securities Regulatory Commission to list on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary shares (ADS), raising up to US $125 million, with Bank of America Securities, Citigroup Inc and Haitong International as co-underwriters.
It's worth mentioning that 51job Inc (NASDAQ:JOBS) recently completed an investment of about $80 million and acquired a 17.5% stake in CDP Group, according to the 6Muk document submitted to SEC on Nov. 15, US Eastern time. Shortly after 51job Inc submitted the 6murk documents, the CDP Group also formally submitted its prospectus.
In the 15 years since its establishment, CDP Group has successively obtained equity investments from Morgan Stanley, Broadband Capital, Stowe Capital (formerly Fidelity Asia), Silver Ruida Investor AB and Japan's Sumitomo Group, with a strong institutional investor lineup.
From 2017 to September 30, 2019, CDP Group has provided HCM services to more than 3600 customers in about 1000 groups around the world, and as of the date of the prospectus, the platform has more than 1 million user accounts. CDP's customer base spans a wide range of industries, including large multinational group customers such as health care, education, technology, financial services, logistics, manufacturing, automotive, professional services, luxury retail and fashion, as well as outstanding Chinese companies.
The prospectus also quoted Frost Sullivan as saying that CDP Group is the number one provider of SaaS payroll and benefits services and the top three providers of human resources solutions in the industry. The prospectus mentions that CDP's group customers achieved a customer retention rate of 98.7% in 2018. The income retention rate of group customers is 120.2%, which fully reflects the high stickiness and stable growth ability of its business model.
According to the prospectus, Wang Wei, CEO and co-founder of CDP, served as IBM software architect and head of SAP's North American consulting business in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s, and later worked in positions such as Schneider Electric CIO. Lu Wei, president and co-founder, has more than 10 years of human resources experience in a global consulting firm, and has served as head of the HR consulting business of Deloitte, Nortel and Caijie Ernst & Young. The main management of the company has also worked in large international consulting organizations and multinational groups.
According to the public business introduction of CDP, CDP EcoSaaS is a highly integrated one-stop digital human capital management platform, which covers the entire employee benefits and life cycle, and the mobile end of the platform provides a consumer-level employee user experience. Its one-stop human capital management services integrate wages and social security, control cost risks for enterprises, and improve compliance efficiency so as to help enterprises achieve sustainable and high replication growth. In addition, CDP Group also integrates the services and applications of business partners into its own EcoSaaS platform to improve the breadth and depth of services and build an open business partner ecosystem. According to its prospectus, CDP already has more than 200 partners, and the platform directly connects with partner technology systems to jointly provide services for customers.
According to the public introduction of its business, CDP has an insurance brokerage license, and its overall solution of big welfare and great health provides employees with welfare programs, commercial insurance and other services through platform integration, service integration and resource integration, and helps enterprises enhance their employees' engagement and loyalty by improving their sense of belonging and well-being.
According to the CDP prospectus, the funds raised will be mainly used in three aspects: one is to enhance the research and development capability of the CDP EcoSaaS platform; the second is to strengthen sales and marketing capabilities to expand the group's service scope at home and abroad; in addition, it will be used to meet the company's general operating purposes. This application for listing should be the first Chinese-listed stock of HR SaaS to land on the US capital market.