Hong Kong stock exchange cancelled the listing after the company failed to resume trading in its shares by a December deadline, according to a bourse statement. — Reuters
HONG KONG: Jimmy Lai’s Next Digital Ltd has ceased trading for good on Hong Kong’s stock exchange, marking the end of an often controversial share listing.
The exchange cancelled the listing after the company failed to resume trading in its shares by a December deadline, according to a bourse statement.
Shares of Next Digital, the parent of defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, had been halted since the newspaper was raided by police in June 2021.
From the outset, Lai’s outspoken position on the Communist Party made it hard for his firms to do business.
In 1994, Beijing moved to close the Chinese outlets of his clothing chain Giordano after he called Li Peng, then China’s premier, a “turtle’s egg with zero IQ”.
His media company, then called Next Media Group, tried and failed a dozen times to secure a listing in Hong Kong before conducting a reverse takeover in 1999 to gain a backdoor listing.
The challenge didn’t end there. Lai struggled to get approval from the stock exchange to sell his Apple Daily newspaper and Next magazine assets to the unprofitable Next Media, before succeeding in 2001 after Lai pledged at least HK$60mil (RM33.65mil) of his own money.
Over the following years, Next Media lost advertising revenue due to what it called an organised boycott of its publications, including by major property developers. In 2014, masked men besieged Apple Daily’s printing plant in the wake of citywide protests. — Bloomberg
