Huobi exchange eyes public firm in $77M acquisition deal

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Singapore-headquartered cryptocurrency exchange Huobi is reportedly quietly seeking to acquire Pantronics Holdings, a publicly-listed firm on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, via a reverse takeover strategy.

Pantronics, a public electronics manufacturing service provider founded in 1990 and attained public fame in 2016, made a disclosure of the development to the Hong Kong stock exchange last week.

According to the disclosure, Pantronics will be transferring more than 221 million of its shares to Leon Li, chairman, founder and CEO of Huobi Group, through several of Huobi’s subsidiaries channel. The shares are priced at HK$2.72 (US$0.35) each, for a total of US$77 million. After the deal is completed, Li will become the owner of 73.73% of Pantronics, making him the largest substantial holder of the publicly-listed firm.

This reverse takeover, which involves the transfer of ownership structure of a public firm to a private one, will give Huobi the opportunity to enter the secondary financial market.

According to reports, Pantronics is awaiting confirmation and approval from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

However, Chinese news outlet Gelonghui reported that Pantronics has already transferred 73.73% of its holdings to Li. After the report surfaced the price of the crypto exchange’s token, Huobi Token, jumped by 8%, according to Coinmarketcap data.

The news comes several weeks after the Singapore-based crypto exchange announced its plans to enter the U.S. market. HBUS, a virtual currency marketplace and the U.S. strategic partner of Huobi, announced in July it has started accepting new user registrations by U.S. residents. Through HBUS.com, traders are able to view market data of virtual currencies listed, including candlestick and depth charts. Trading pairs have been listed on HBUS when it activated trading last July 10.

Recently, Huobi teamed up with five companies as part of its ventures into new markets with its Huobi Cloud platform. Huobi selected five firms—Yatai International Holgding Group (Philippines), Vnesheconombank (Russia), Chi Fu Group (Taiwan), Asia International Finance Holdings (Indonesia), and Dbank Group (Canada)—which are looking to develop their own trading platforms.

Note: Tokens on the Bitcoin Core (segwit) Chain are Referred to as BTC coins. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today the only Bitcoin implementation that follows Satoshi Nakamoto’s original whitepaper for Peer to Peer Electronic Cash. Bitcoin BCH is the only major public blockchain that maintains the original vision for Bitcoin as fast, frictionless, electronic cash.