Faced with employee dissatisfaction, the executive chairman of Ant Group Co. said the Chinese financial technology giant will eventually go public and that the company will look for ways to help workers monetize some of its shares.
In a lengthy note on Ant’s internal website in response to a post by an employee asking about the company’s future and how it intends to retain talent, President Eric Jing said the company’s management is reviewing its compensation and incentive policies and working to a “short-term liquidity”. solution ”for employees that will take effect in April, according to people who saw the note. The solution will probably be a program to buy shares of employees, according to people close to the company.
Employee morale has been declining in Ant since Chinese regulators forced the company to cancel successful initial public offerings in Hong Kong and Shanghai in early November.
Many of Ant’s 16,000 workers received stock-based compensation and were about to gather a heart from Ant’s listing, which had valued the company at more than $ 300 billion last fall. This was a doubling of Ant’s valuation since mid-2018, when its last round of private fundraising valued the company at $ 150 billion.
Instead, the owner of the popular payment network Alipay has been forced to restructure its business, give up riskier activities and fully comply with financial regulations that are likely to counteract its growth and profitability. Investors and analysts expect Ant to have a lower valuation as a result, and the company intends to review its business into a financial-holding company that would be supervised by China’s central bank.