Rumor: E-Commerce Fashion Site Vancl Preps for Q4 US IPO

There are reports emerging this afternoon that Chinese e-commerce site Vancl will file its US IPO prospectus in October with a view towards hitting the tickers in the fourth quarter. Vancl has two B2C sites: its Vancl.com own-brand fashion label, and Vjia.com (also known as V+) which is its open platform that sells numerous well-known clothing brands.

This is not official. Sources in the industry, as reported by Sina Tech News, say that Vancl is hoping to raise up to US$1 billion from a US offering. China International Capital, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley are apparently lined up to underwrite Vancl’s bid.

Vancl is rumored to have cut 5 percent of its staff this summer, but that’s not too dramatic a number, and might indicate only a bit of belt-tightening at the company. Compared to one daily deals site in China that has shed 80 percent of its staff, Vancl appears to be in fine health. Indeed, with 1.2 percent of market share of China’s entire B2C segment (shown in red in the graph below), Vancl is curently the leading fashion-specialist e-tailer in the country.

There’s immensely strong competition in China’s B2C sector, where both Alibaba (HKG:1688) and Tencent (HKG:0700) recently invited fellow online shopping sites onto their own open platforms. Vancl itself has opted to launch storefronts on both the revamped TMall.com and the soon-to-open QQ Buy.

Currently, there are no major Chinese web/tech IPOs officially lined up in the States, owing to ongoing global financial troubles, and the summer of turmoil amidst Chinese tech firms on Nasdaq and the NYSE. Two upcoming Chinese-US IPOs were cancelled recently – those of Shanda’s Cloudary, and Xunlei.

Nonetheless, daily deals site Lashou, and books and 3C e-commerce site 360Buy (shown in green in the graph above) are rumored to be lining up for their own IPOs in 2012. Vancl, it seems, could beat them to the tickers.

[Source: Sina Tech news – article in Chinese]