China’s Robot IPO Boom & India’s Biggest IPO Ever Explained

Hello and welcome back to the Market Maker podcast, and on today's episode, we're doing a whistle-stop tour through the global surge in IPOs. So, to start our journey, we're first going to look at robot dogs in China and the pipeline of robotics in IPOs in Hong Kong. You probably saw the kung fu robots uh from state TV in China a few weeks or months ago. So, we'll touch a little bit on that as well. Uh then we're going to jump on a plane, fly to India to take a look at potentially the biggest IPO on record. So, not sure most of our listeners would have even realized that that was going to happen, but you know, this is an emerging superpower, and these companies are big. And then it's off to Pakistan, where we'll find out what the heck is a Kinao. Have I said that right, Stephen? A Kinao? >> I've no idea. Kinao? Kinao? >> [laughter] >> Okay, we'll find out. There we go. This is how expert we are. Uh we're struggling how to say it, but we'll explain all when we get to it. And then for the first time ever on this pod, and actually responding to some of the community, cuz we do have a little bit of a fan base in Zambia. We're going to look at the IPO market in Zambia after a recent pro-business election. And if we have time, we might also dip into the US. Always plenty going on, of course, with our friends across the pond. But first, why are we doing this? Perhaps maybe to start, Stephen, you could take us through the global picture at the moment. >> Yeah, and I'd love to take you through the global picture, but first I'm just going to do a very quick shout-out to everyone that did the CFA exams yesterday, our time, last Thursday as this episode goes out. Uh our erstwhile researcher, Darius, he hopefully smashed his CFA level one. And I remember, just as a very, very quick and and pretty distasteful anecdote, I remember doing the CFA level one. It was in the Excel center, big old warehouse, convention center out in the east of London. And I remember getting through the first half thinking that went pretty well, having lunch. Second half, it was in the days it was 6 hours of exams. Second half, there was a There was a small There was a small female candidate that obviously wasn't feeling very well. And unfortunately, she didn't get to the bathroom in time. And >> [laughter] >> and and and subsequently vomited and ran out of the ran out of the building right next to me. And so the So the adjudicator, the examiner, didn't really know what to do. So just covered it up with a with a towel. And that was there for the 2 and 1/2 hours of my afternoon exam. >> looked at you and went, "Look, son, crack on." >> Yeah, it's just like you're going to you're going to deal with a lot more than this in the world of high finance. So there I was with a whole afternoon session with an empty seat next to me and and and a towel. >> Well, yeah, yeah, this is a reminiscing of the trading floor of a bygone era. There would have been plenty of that, but not sick through nerves, maybe from something digested the night before. >> Well, look, if the person that was unfortunately unwell way back in 2010 is listening, maybe 2011 actually, shout out to that person. I hope they're still in finance in some way, shape, or form. >> [laughter] >> Well, look, look look looking at this global >> uh map then, the the resourcing or the resource that we often go to and something which everyone can check out, Dealogic or the FT Investment Banking League Tables. But perhaps Stephen, that's a good place you could walk us through cuz I know on the map there's some points of difference and it'd be interesting to get your take on the geographies and how it's split. >> Yeah, it's really interesting. So I'm looking at the Dealogic Equity Capital Markets IPO Global Map. And overall this year there has been 250 billion what 240 billion dollars worth of IPO issuance. So this is new funds raised through the process of going from being a private to a public company. That is up 169% year-on-year. The main contributor? Well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? It's the US. We've spoken about SpaceX. 156.8 billion dollars of IPO proceeds, 327% increase year-on-year. And this number just dwarfs everyone else, right? You get quite excited when you see Canada up 718%. You're like, here we go Canada, but the total proceeds 2.2 billion dollars. >> [laughter] >> So and LatAm up 328%. Total proceeds 1.9 billion dollars. So there's not a lot of money in the IPO market outside of the US. Europe up 117%. 17 billion dollars worth of IPOs. Asia ex-Japan. Now this is a big one and we're going to talk about it. Up 63% with nearly 53 billion dollars worth of IPO proceeds. So that's the other area of the world that's really really got to significant scale. And then you've got the Middle East and Africa down 16% actually with IPO proceeds of around 5 billion. Probably due to what's going on in the Middle East at the moment to be totally honest. So it's a mixed picture, but there are a few regions in this world that are absolutely storming on the IPO front. And if anyone's been listening to this podcast for the last few years or following the world of equity capital markets, me and you Anton, had anything to talk about for about 2 years. And that would If you look back through our episode titles, we did not There were no IPOs in any of them. So, it's quite fun to talk about it. >> Just a question then, if I was a person starting my career and I was targeting equity capital markets, ECM, do I need to go to New York then? Is that Is that the takeaway point that you're saying then, given the massive division of where all the action is happening? It's so concentrated in the US. Would that be the most optimal place to sit in that particular function of investment banking? >> Yeah, I mean, New York is probably the alpha place to go in terms of fees and in terms of the size of these IPOs. However, there's a couple of things to note. Firstly, the bigger the IPO quantum, the amount that's being raised, the smaller the percentage fee. As we've discussed previously, if you're a SpaceX, and you're getting 85 billion out there, you can really, really squeeze the banks on the fees relative to a much smaller issuance, maybe somewhere in the Middle East or in Latin America, where your fees, because it'll be a little bit harder, maybe a little bit more complex, your fees as a percentage of the total raise will be a lot higher. Now, secondly, it's worth looking at the overall equity capital markets league tables and figuring out that IPOs, although they're very they're very cool things as we've discussed, are always the minority of an overall revenue fee makeup for these big banks. So, Goldman Sachs, follow-on, like rights issues, follow-on invest follow-on share issuance, 40% of the fees, convertible notes, 25% of the fees, JP Morgan, 44% on follow-ons and 25% on convertibles as well. So, actually your bread and butter even in good IPO years, your bread and butter is your rights issues, your convertible loan issuances, that kind of thing. So, if I was an equity capital markets aspiring banker, quite frankly, I'd get to an I'd get to somewhere interesting in the world, right? It's easy raising, you know, doing an IPO for a leading tech company on the New York Stock Exchange going to the biggest asset managers around the US. What might be quite hard is getting a Pakistani fruit company over the line with an IPO or a Indian derivatives exchange company over line. That's probably if you're a little bit more adventurous, that's where the fun is, right? >> So, so on that point, before we move on, I had a coffee catch-up with someone from our alumni, and she had worked 2 years at one of these top elite bulge bracket banks in M&A. And then she pivoted and now she's working in in private equity, in sort of green infrastructure and stuff like that. She made an interesting point, and it's kind of what you were saying. The bank she worked with, she said while she had pretty good job security cuz we were never short of pipeline. But what it felt like was you just worked on a deal and then the next deal and then the next deal. It was all kind of execution. What she actually missed and craved a little bit was a little bit of you know, the negotiation, trying to tender to win a deal, to win the mandate. You didn't really learn any of those skills because soon as you completed a deal, the next deal, you move straight on to the next time. >> It's absolutely right, and I think maybe you cut your teeth in the big bulge brackets as we've kind of given advice before, but then there's so many interesting other smaller parts of finance where you're a little bit more entrepreneurial working for a boutique or or kind of small to mid-market M&A advisory firm where you're getting to know and generating relationships with tech companies all the way from seed stage all the way through. That's a little bit more maybe entrepreneurial, a little bit more exciting. Um but it's always good to be where the action is in the first few years of your career. >> Absolutely. All right, well let's Let's talk about China first because that's the one where there's just the coolest videos and graphics of, you know, kung fu fighting robots and and dogs that look like they're from Black Mirror and give me the creeps, the heebie-jeebies, but let's talk about the IPO market and this kind of gold rush. We talked about this a few weeks ago, I think, when I met my friend from the Hong Kong exchange and he was just saying how incredible it is and the flow at the moment. So, what are some of these companies that are listing in China? >> Yeah, well let's start off with the big one, Unitree Robotics. And and apologies to the listeners for the rest of this episode because I had dedicated some time to research for the whole of this episode, but then got totally distracted watching videos >> [laughter] >> of of these humanoid robots and these these robot dogs climbing up impossible steps and doing all of their things. And you're thinking to yourself, this is just totally, totally remarkable. And I can imagine a little bit if like if you're surrounded by the Silicon Valley, San Francisco mindset of abundance and anything is possible and we're changing the world, I can imagine if you immerse yourself in the world of embodied AI in robotics in this way, you see what you see the world in a totally, totally different place. And it's really, really interesting. And obviously, it's incredibly well hyped. Unitree Robotics, which is the big IPO of last week. I'm just going to scroll down two or three pages of photos in my notes. Photos. >> [laughter] >> I thought I'd give them to you, Ant, because you love this kind of stuff. I'm looking here at the the Unitree H2 Plus. So, that's the integrated R&D and manufacturing full stack humanoid robot. I like the Unitree G1 cuz you can pick it up for about 13.5 K. And it's got a lot of wizzy tech. It can do some quite cool stuff. And then I also really like the Unitree A2, which is the Stella Explorer dog-like robot. I I don't yet know precisely what it does, but it kind of it would be better behaved than my dog. Let's just say that. >> I thought the same thing. Quick quick headline, it would be things like security. For example, think about if you had like a warehouse, you'd just have a couple of dogs trolling the warehouse. Like stalking the floors, make sure my humans are doing the work in the back of house at Argus. Has Steven has Steven been replaced with a dog at Argus? My dog is watching you, Steven. >> Yeah, yeah. And look, if I try and stick a GoPro onto my cocker spaniel, it doesn't work quite so well. So, >> [laughter] >> Yeah, that's a very good point. Yeah, guide dogs, that kind of thing. Um but any but anyway, so Unitree, the big story here is that they raised 6.1 billion yuan, which is the equivalent of 904 million dollars on Shanghai's STAR S T A R market. So, this was an unbelievable success from an IPO perspective and one that was extremely heavily anticipated to the extent that it was oversubscribed. I'm going to talk about this in a minute. Oversubscribed 5,526 times. So, individual retail investors in China in China requested 1.2 trillion dollars worth of Unitary stock. Bearing in mind they raised just under a billion. So much so that the share price surged as much as 600% on debut, settling up 460% to give the company a market cap around 50 billion dollars. This is absolutely bonkers, right? You know, it's I don't know I don't know whether this is going to be the bubble that we talk about, but it's certainly representative of some of those crazy crazy times in the dot-com era. >> From what we know then from the financial performance of the business, how much of that valuation is pricing in the future of robotics and embodied AI as opposed to what the company's actually doing today from what we know? >> Yeah, it's an interesting Well, yeah, this is all about the future, right? But their growth is staggering. So, their financials from a very low base, they grew from about 400 million yuan in 2000 2024 to 1.7 billion this year in 2025, sorry. So, that's a 4x increase year-on-year. They're profitable. They've got a gross profit margin of over 60% which you think to yourself, huh, well, software companies have gross profit margins of 80%, but then you look at the website and they're building humanoid robots, right? That is their cost of goods line. It's amazing that they can establish a gross profit margin of over 60%. So, the fact that this company is growing 4x 400% plus a year from a top line perspective and it's already profitable and we know that the next arms race or even the current arms race in this AI industrial revolution is robotics and turning intelligence into physical intelligence then it kind of stands to reason that companies like Unitree and we'll talk about a few others in a minute are garnering such attention and such hype and it's coming out of China. It's not coming out of the US. >> Yeah, you know, it is interesting like you said. So, the way I was thinking about it was this kind of step-by-step almost like the supply chain. So, you have chips that then lead to models which lead to intelligence which then lead to the machines and that's where this humanoid next phase of the evolution that embodied AI. So, the robot's going to need motors, batteries, sensors, cameras, all of these things to happen. And I think that's why it's all centralized in China for this robotics side of things. You know, if you think about China and its history in terms of its economic story of the last few decades, just enormous manufacturing infrastructure. Supply chains built around electronics. So, it's almost like it's not like when you try to have in in the UK and um you know, I take a comparable when you have like a legacy bank or a challenger bank where you're building on top of an archaic stack and trying to then turn it into something more modern. In China, it's always been built for manufacturing as its core core process. So, I think you know, many of the capabilities developed for one technological revolution can potentially be repurposed in that way. So, yeah, I I was always thinking that of like why China and you know, there's lots of stuff online about their demographic kind of cliff edge that they have just given the aging population, lack of birth rates, the potential then they're being superseded by India with a much younger age demographic. Economically, they won't want to give that up and the long-term road map that they're on for to be the dominant force. So, that leads me to your a question for you then. Um from a Chinese perspective, the government is obviously intimately involved with these types of companies by size and influence, particularly when it comes to technological advantage as well, particularly as you mentioned against someone like the US. So, how do you square that circle with how this fits? Cuz I remember when Jack Ma, do you remember when he disappeared when Alibaba was just going gangbusters? And he had the app of all apps and business model that was going everywhere, lots of tentacles. And then he kind of disappeared. And he's kind of returned, but he seems a bit like a different person. >> [laughter] >> So, so how does this play out for the connections, uh I guess, yeah, influence, its close proximity to the government and therefore regulation, all these types of things. >> Yeah, it's super interesting. And again, anyone that's old enough to or has read enough history to have explored the Cold War economic and philosophical ideological battle between state central planning of Russia versus the entrepreneurial free spirits and free markets of the US can see real parallels in this China versus US relationship. And obviously, the US model beat the very, very extremely centralized and also extremely corrupt uh, Russian system. But, then current rival China is a very, very different beast. It's got the advantages of market, quote unquote, socialist capitalism, but it's also got the central planning. So, and you are starting to see this come through. China has the advantage of saying, "Hey, what are we worried about over the next 50 years? Okay, we don't have a load of natural resources, so we are going to corner the market for solar and wind, which is what they've done." Hey, we might be falling off a demographic cliff edge, we are going to put all of our energy into the robotic side because we have the infrastructure. Now, in the US, the market, the invisible hand of the market, determines, to a much greater extent, where the flow of capital and the flow of a flow of intelligence is going. So, for a very long time, it was social media and apps and things like that, which is where all of the all of the venture capital money went. And therefore, you're thinking to yourself, "Hmm, okay, maybe China's played a bit of a blinder here." And it's quite interesting to see how this centralized ecosystem plays out in something like a stock market listing. You would have thought an IPO is the most American capitalist ring the bell, New York Stock Exchange, thing that you can possibly have. But if you look at Unitarian, you look at the fact that they were so over subscribed with 1.2 trillion dollars of of Chinese retail investors wanting to pile in, this is a representation of the fact that the Chinese central government, CCP, are pretty heavily controlling of the flow of IPOs. We We saw CXMT, the chip processor, the chip designer, chip a chip maker IPO last month, and I think that was 5,000 plus times over subscribed, surged 466%. So, these national champions, the AI infrastructure, the robotics, etc., etc., these national champions, they get hyped up internally within China, and then you get this rip-roaring stock market debut that is representative of all of the biggest dot-com bubble uh bubbles, as it were. >> Maybe it's one for Piers that I can take up with him when he returns from uh from holiday. That How do you How do you as a Western person get exposure long-term to the Chinese robotic rise, I guess? Cuz you can't just pick up these Chinese shares being sat here domiciled in the UK, right? I'd be interested to see >> Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely one for Piers, but maybe worth moving on to Hong Kong because there's a little bit more access to the Hong Kong than there is to the STAR. >> Right. So, how do So, Hong Kong presumably there's there's plenty of companies that are Chinese that would like to get access to Western inflows of interest. >> Yeah, I'm just going to give you a list, a very, very quick run-through of of the pipeline of prospective IPOs in Hong Kong. So, this is confidential filings not yet priced. And just I'm sure you can pick up a trend here. So, LimX Dynamics, this is embodied AI, embodied robots, based in Shenzhen, backed by Alibaba, JD, IDG Capital. So, they're looking at a, you know, a pretty bumper IPO at some point in 2026. >> Can I just stop you there? >> Yeah. >> The picture has got a robot ballet dancing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is def- These are more pictures than they are notes this this week. And >> [laughter] >> I just got totally carried away. Uh Xiangshu Technology, so this is maker of Vedu AI uh video generator, Alibaba backed, mulling a Hong Kong IPO. Robot Era, embodied AI company based in Beijing, potentially targeting a $1 billion IPO in Hong in Hong Kong later this year. AI Squared Robotics, based in Shenzhen, 2027 IPO potentially. X-squared Robot, based in Shenzhen, confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO. And the list goes on. So, this is, you know, I tell you what, Hong Kong having been down in the doldrums for a few years from a financial center perspective, these guys are, you know, up in the mid-levels, up in, you know, at the at their bars clinking their very expensive drinks and feeling very happy with themselves. >> I love the the marketing psychology and how these robotic firms position themselves. It seems to strike to the heart of two core human uh areas of expression of between joy and fear. So, the images are either an expression of pure, like, liberation and joy and freedom of, like, movement capsulated in ballet and these sorts of things, which is a literal image for one of these firms. Then the other ones is just pure military, scary, like, dictatorship robots all lined up, looking really badass. It's funny how that's the way that they've positioned the the the optics of it. >> Yeah, which is kind of weird because the things that impressed me most whenever I'm watching these videos are the prosaic, mundane, day-to-day tasks that these robots can do. So, I would much I'd much rather see a picture of a robot stacking a shelf, right? So, or or doing something in a warehouse or you know, folding my laundry or something like that. That's much more interesting than a ballet dancer or a gang of robots that look like they're going to beat you up. I don't know. Yeah, it's a very interesting one from a marketing perspective. >> So, we know then that the Hong Kong exchange is getting record levels of income at the moment. What does that mean for banking or bankers in that region? So, presumably then a lot of the activity if you're working on these these bold brackets, would they ever second like people from other geographies to come because can you recruit quick enough to keep up with demand here? >> Yeah, it's it's an interesting one. They would definitely be recruiting. They would definitely be seconding. They would definitely be getting bankers in from different parts of the world to satiate or satisfy the demand. I mean, market-wide IPO stats in Hong Kong this year has been over 40 billion HK raised this year. On track to beat 2021 and possibly 2020, the two standout years for IPOs in Hong Kong. IPO volume up 94% 87 companies have raised over 212 billion Hong Kong dollars across IPOs and and follow-on issuances. So, yeah. You would definitely want to get more junior bankers in this region. That's one of the great things about globalization, but also about young people is they're pretty mobile, right? Try and get me to go to Hong Kong for 6 months, I think there might be a few conversations back at home. Try and get a 25-year-old to go to Hong Kong for 6 months and they'll be like, "Yeah, of course. It's great fun." >> Or maybe then let let let's hop on the plane and just go over to India then. And India's one I'm always interested in because we don't talk about it a great deal. And I don't think she gets probably nearly enough coverage when you're situated in either Western Europe or in North America. But, this could be a huge IPO. So, who is it exactly we're talking about? What does that marketplace look like? >> Yeah, so this is the National Stock Exchange of India, potentially the country's biggest ever IPO. So, the NSE, National Stock Exchange of India, is the operator of the world's largest derivatives exchange by volume and India's dominant stock exchange. It is targeting a valuation of up to 5.26 trillion rupees, which is a $55 billion valuation, trying to raise about 3 and 1/2 billion dollars, which would beat Hyundai's India's 278 billion rupee 2024 IPO. So, this is the biggest IPO ever in India and it is the Indian stock exchange, right? And if it does manage to IPO at that market capitalization of $55 billion, it will pull in just behind the London Stock Exchange of the largest stock exchanges by market capitalization. The largest, CME Group, 96 billion. Then the then the ICE, Intercontinental Exchange, Hong Kong Exchange at $65 billion, Deutsche Börse at $60 billion, the London Stock Exchange, and then it would be India's national stock exchange. So, this is I mean, this is a pretty big story, right? And again, it get it goes to the heart of just how big the market is in India. It's the world's largest derivatives market by volume. This is a stock exchange that has the potential to have a market capitalization just short of the LSE and higher than Nasdaq. >> That word that word potential, the long-term potential of India to have capital exposure to that geography. I'm assuming everyone wants a piece of this this IPO globally. >> Oh my god, yeah. So, I love I love the concept of a roadshow, and this roadshow was a massive one. So, the IPO roadshow is where the bankers and the CEO and the CFO and a couple of the other company bigwigs get on a plane and meet a load of investors. And this roadshow, they met 120 global investors across Boston, New York, San Francisco, London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, including the likes of BlackRock, Capital Group, Janus Henderson, GQG Partners, etc. So, this is you know, this is an absolute and utter monster, and there are 20 banks on the ticket. So, the likes of JP Morgan, I'm sorry, so Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Citigroup, and then a couple of that you might not have heard of, JM Financial, and Kotak Mahindra Capital, which is the biggest equity capital markets bank in India. So, again, one of the reasons why I love doing these tours is you just get to see some different names, right? >> Yeah, yeah. And JP Morgan was there. So, in this instance, does JP Morgan have advisers locally who are sat in I don't know, Mumbai for example, or Delhi, or do they have a center out of London that would deal with this sort of transaction? >> Yeah, and it it's different depending on obviously the extent of the presence in that particular satellite jurisdiction. Usually, and I would take HSBC as an example, and HSBC's changed a lot since I was there, but what would be what would normally be the case is that you would have relationship bankers on the ground in Mumbai. So, you'd have the ones that are developing the long-term relationship with the National Stock Exchange of India, and building that banking relationship doing a number of the flow products, the relationship management, the debit cards, all of this kind of stuff, and then feeding in to a regional hub that has some of the M&A bankers. And that in the case of India for HSBC would be in Dubai. So, Indian IPOs would probably be dealt with by the Middle Eastern central M&A and corporate finance investment banking team. Now, for some banks, they might want to have an M&A or an investment banking presence in Mumbai on the ground to really really service that growing market. It really just depends on how big you know, if you have if you're a bank that has a relationship management or a relationship banking relationship with 300 of the top 500 Indian companies, then you probably want to have an IBD team there on the ground to service those clients. But if you're a slightly smaller organization, or it's a slightly smaller satellite, then yes, you'd have the relationship management, and then you get the big wigs coming in from the regional hub. >> Makes sense. All right. Well, look, just quickly get through then this whistle-stop tour by taking a a brief trip to Pakistan and Zambia. So, what have you got for me? >> Yeah, I can I can probably guarantee you there won't be too many high-earning IBD bankers based in Pakistan or Zambia. But again, get on get on the comments if if I'm proved wrong. So, let's start in Pakistan. This has been a record IPO year powered by fruit exports. So, this is SE Fruit and Vegetable Limited, which, as we said at the head of this episode, is an exporter of mangoes, potatoes, and kinnow. Now, Ant, what's a kinnow? >> No idea. >> [laughter] >> I didn't know until I started researching this. And obviously I got I got distracted by robotics, but it did do this bit of research. So, kinnow, many of you might know, is a high-yield hybrid citrus fruit created by crossing two mandarin cultivars, the King mandarin and the Willow Leaf mandarin. It was developed in California in 1935, and it's now predominantly grown in the winter months across the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. And they are a major commercial crop. So, this kinnow is the basis or the largest revenue contributor of SE Fruit and Vegetables. And, you know, they IPO'd I think well, actually sorry, they I they're planning to IPO next month raising 1.9 billion rupees, which sounds impressive, but it's only 6.8 million dollars. So, it's not big bucks from a SpaceX perspective, but this is a pretty impressive company. So, revenue compound annual growth of 28% over the last 4 years. Everyone would be any company would be pretty happy with that. Profit margin at 31% So, it's got a massive order book. It's main customers are from the Middle East who obviously love Kinnow. >> [laughter] >> And yeah, it's a representation of the fact that Pakistan, you know, it's the biggest IPO year on record, which is quite interesting. >> That is interesting and like 2026 then Pakistan's busiest IPO year on record, 10 deals they've done raising a combined 200 million US dollars. So, yeah, pretty pretty good guys. So, I'm in the wrong line of business here. I need to go I need to be a fruit exporter. I feel like there's some there's some risk from the weather in that region. I wonder how that's played out if once they're a listed company going further forward in future. But I guess they're just rising demand if they're selling to the Middle East and Central Asia and they're becoming in a more and emerging middle class and wealthy spending patterns for fruits. Hybrid fruit. >> And I didn't mention just how good these Kinnow things are, right? So, you know, you know, each tree can produce up to 1,000 fruits per tree. It peels easily and has a This is according to Wikipedia. It peels easily and has a high juice content. No knives required by consumers. So, if you're harvesting them though, use sharp pruning shears. That's That's all [laughter] I got. >> in mind when I'm mowing the lawn. All right, final stop then, Zambia. You mentioned there's been some political change which has potentially opened the the gates to this this region. >> Yeah, so this is the Lusaka Securities Exchange. So, the LuSE. So, the CEO of the Lusaka Stock Exchange, Nicholas Kabaso, expects a record $1 billion of IPOs post-election, which is not to be sniffed at across manufacturing, telecoms, mining, financial services, and property. So, there was an election a couple of weeks ago, August 13th. Pro-business incumbent Hakainde Hichilema, that's pretty good pronunciation, I think, won a second term by bigger margin than in 2021, and this is going to open the doors for the Lusaka Stock Exchange some serious IPO action. Bearing in mind that Zambia is Africa's second biggest copper copper producer, which is pretty fundamental, and the Lusaka Stock Exchange has more than doubled in dollar terms in the last year, sitting near all-time highs. However, we must take this in context. There are only about 20 listed companies on the Lusaka Stock Exchange with a market cap of about $10 billion cumulatively. So, again, this is a really, really small market, but there was a company called Dot Com Zambia that IPO'd in December 2025, and it jumped from revenue jumped from $214 million to $530 million in the last year. This is an e-toll technology company. This was an IPO that was 114 times oversubscribed. With 75% of new shareholders being Zambian. So, this is really interesting. That yes, it's a small market. Yes, $10 billion is not a lot, but in the context of the Zambian economy, what you want is you want a stock exchange that is getting some domestic companies listing that are growing that retail investors from that country, from Zambia, are taking advantage of and it really brings up not just the companies, but also the investors, you know, the retail investors. So, it's actually a really nice story and a representation of why stock exchanges when they work can benefit domestic economies. >> Talking of nice stories, maybe to close then and given, you know, we've been talking about the the boom from Hong Kong, China, these other areas, the potential record in India. There is one though in the US cuz we always champion the US for many different reasons that hasn't quite gone to plan on the IPO front. So, who who was this one? >> Yeah, so this was a company called L3Harris Inc. Uh so, it's based it's based in uh Vermont, I think. And it's a defense a defense tech firm combining sensors, antennas, and proprietary software for military use. And you think to yourself, defense tech, pretty nice industry, it's had a brilliant run-up over the last couple of years, but this IPO has been an absolute flop. So, it was marketed by Evercore, the advisers Citigroup and Guggenheim at a price range of $19 to $22 per share, but then got downsized to $17.50 and only 17 million shares sold to raise just under $300 million and and it closed down 14% after the first day. And this is really interesting cuz it just goes to show the crowding out nature of some of these mega IPOs. And if I'm an investment manager, if I'm an asset manager, and I've got a certain allocation of new proceeds to new IPO issuances and I've spent 40% of it on SpaceX and I'm allocating another 40% to Anthropic. I don't have a great deal left and even defense tech, which is a kind of very attractive industry or sector, is not getting the love that robotics is not getting the love that AI is getting. >> I did see on Defense Hardware Castelleon. I don't know if you caught that story this week. No, tell me. They're a cutting-edge defense Well, they they classify as defense technology as well, but they raised $1 billion in a series C. Which the one of their main um people involved with that was Carlyle. In particular. Now, one of this is financing the scale production of Blackbird or yeah, Blackbeard, excuse me. That's a mass-produced hypersonic strike missile. You remember when we talked about your Cambridge firm the other day, check out the Castelleon website. That will that that will get you excited. But my question to you then is is that why they've gone to series C, do you think? Do you think that I mean, these all would have happened at the same time. Would that be part of the the strategy to continue building on it through these funding rounds rather than go to market too early? The value The valuation of Castelleon at present with this fund round was 13 billion. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think that if you are not an AI company thinking about raising money then probably an IPO isn't your one this year in the US. Uh so, yes, there's still plenty of of private dollars out there for these types of companies as we saw with Cambridge Aerospace last week. They keep keep it private. Go for another couple of rounds and this stuff is isn't going anywhere. I mean, I don't know enough about the technology of Linetrust too to opine on whether it's better than Castilleon, but who knows? I would definitely say hold off the IPO. Go for private funding rounds. Wait for a couple of years. Wait until the Anthropic's through. If OpenAI does get through, wait until that's gone through and and and possibly be crashed. >> Also, I got to finish on this quote from the co-founder and CEO of Castilleon. You'll like this one. It came with the press release with the funding round. This is definitely aimed at at Donald Trump. He said, "Deterrence depends on unapologetic American strength. Highly capable weapon systems that adversaries fear, produced in quantities that they cannot imagine at a price taxpayers can afford." So, this is >> Wow. >> playing the game. >> That is the bombast that we expect from these American companies. >> [laughter] >> All right. We'll wrap it up there. Hopefully people found that enjoyable. Uh particularly just covering some of these other areas in the robotic side. Again, we are not technologists or engineers. So, absolutely feel free to pitch in if you have views and thoughts about robotics and uh embodied AI in general. So, Stephen, thanks as always. >> Thanks, Ed.