China nickel provider Lygend Resources to go public in Hong Kong

By Min Zhang and Dominique Patton

BEIJING, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Chinese nickel producer and trader Lygend Resources & Technology Co Ltd has applied to make an initial public share offering on the Hong Kong Exchange.

The application did not reveal how much money Lygend plans to raise from the Hong Kong IPO. Its Jan-Sept profit last year stood at 415 million yuan ($65.5 million).

The filing late on Tuesday came after the Ningbo-based company submitted a request to China’s securities regulator in late January. nP8N2U7028

Lygend Resources, which says it is China’s biggest nickel ore trader with around 27% market share in 2020, trades laterite nickel ore sourced from miners in the Philippines and Turkey as well as nickel pig iron (NPI) from Indonesia.

It also produces nickel products at home and abroad, with domestic annual NPI production at 180,000 tonnes and two projects with Indonesian partners.

The company had invested heavily to expand business and explore more materials in the nickel sector as the resource is gaining traction amid a global new energy boom.

Its $1.05 billion worth of project with Harita Group is the first high-pressure acid leach (HPAL) project in Indonesia to reach production. nL2N2N60XR

Lygend also jointly operates a rotary klin electric furnace (RKEF) project on Obi Island, Indonesia and expects to commence production between 2022-2024.

Lygend traded around 9.2 million tonnes of nickel products in the first three quarters of 2021 and made 11,734 tonnes of NPI during that period, according to the filing.

The company aims to realise an annual capacity of 500,000 tonnes of nickel and 23,000 tonnes of cobalt in the next five to ten years.

($1 = 6.3397 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Min Zhang and Dominique Patton; Editing by Stephen Coates)

((min.zhang@thomsonreuters.com; (8610) 5669-2105;))