Overseas Biotech IPOs in Hong Kong: Short-Term Gain, Long-Term Pressure

Last week in the lab, I chatted with a postdoc working on ADCs about the funding environment. He complained that the domestic primary market's attitude toward innovative drugs has become so granular that it's now "no money for just looking at targets; money only comes after seeing clinical data." Then today, I saw this news: US-based Axiom Biosciences is going to list on the HKEX, raising $150-200 million, and France's TheraVectys is also in line. This is interesting. In the short term, it's an international validation of the HKEX Chapter 18A regime. In the long run, it will likely accelerate the reshuffling of domestic Biotechs, especially those companies with insufficient pipeline differentiation that rely on platform stories to prop up their valuations.