Hong Kong’s IPO Crown Is About to Be Snatched — By a Single Deal

It took Hong Kong six years, three rounds of regulatory reform, and a historic wave of Chinese technology listings to reclaim the title of the world’s largest IPO market. It will take Elon Musk approximately one afternoon in June to take it away again.

On Wednesday, SpaceX filed its public prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, targeting a Nasdaq debut around June 12 under the ticker SPCX. The offering is expected to raise up to $75 billion at a valuation nearing $1.75 trillion — a figure that would make it the largest initial public offering in the history of capital markets, nearly tripling the $29.4 billion Saudi Aramco raised in 2019. That $75 billion sum would also exceed twice the total funds raised by every company that listed in Hong Kong across the entirety of 2025.

The arithmetic is blunt. The implications run considerably deeper.

How Hong Kong Got Here — and Why the Timing Stings

The Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing’s (HKEX) reclamation of the global IPO crown in 2025 was not a fluke. It was earned, painstakingly, through structural reform and geopolitical tailwinds that converged in ways even optimists hadn’t fully anticipated.

According to data from LSEG, a total of 114 companies raised $37.22 billion on HKEX’s main board in 2025 — a 229% increase from the $11.3 billion raised in 2024. That pushed Hong Kong from fifth place to first globally, the exchange’s highest ranking since the pandemic-era boom of 2019 and 2021. Nasdaq finished second at $27.53 billion; India’s NSE and BSE followed in third and fourth.

The recovery wasn’t a single surge. It was built on a structural realignment. A record wave of A+H listings — companies trading simultaneously on both mainland Chinese exchanges (A-shares) and the Hong Kong exchange (H-shares) — accounted for more than 50% of total funds raised. PwC’s Hong Kong Capital Markets team recorded 76 A+H listings in 2025, up from 30 the year before — a 153% increase that reflected both Beijing’s strategic support for offshore fundraising and a fast-tracked listing process that HKEX had engineered specifically for such deals.

The momentum carried into 2026. By the end of the first quarter, KPMG reported that Hong Kong’s IPO market had raised HK$109.9 billion across 40 new listings — a staggering 489% increase in funds raised year on year, and the strongest first-quarter performance in five years. Nasdaq placed second in the Q1 global ranking with just $5.65 billion from 18 listings. Hong Kong wasn’t merely ahead — it was lapping the field.

Then came Wednesday’s filing.

The SpaceX Effect: When One Deal Reshapes a Market

The single most consequential fact about the SpaceX IPO isn’t the size. It’s the concentration.

At $75 billion, the SpaceX offering would alone represent more than the combined IPO proceeds of the second and third ranked global exchanges in 2025. It would, in a single transaction on a single exchange, transform Nasdaq from a distant runner-up into the unambiguous leader of the 2026 global IPO league table — regardless of what Hong Kong achieves over the remaining seven months of the year.

The prospectus filed in New York reveals a company of genuine complexity. SpaceX generated $18.674 billion in consolidated revenue in 2025, anchored by its Connectivity segment — primarily the Starlink satellite internet service, which now serves more than nine million subscribers and produced a quarterly operating profit of $1.19 billion in Q1 2026. Yet the company also posted a $2.589 billion operating loss for the full year 2025, driven almost entirely by the xAI division that SpaceX absorbed. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the AI segment swung to a $2.47 billion loss on just $818 million in revenue.

Elon Musk will retain 85.1% of voting power through a dual-class share structure — 12.3% of Class A stock and 93.6% of Class B shares. Georgetown University finance professor Reena Aggarwal has noted that valuing SpaceX is inherently difficult because no comparable peer group exists. Reuters reported the company plans to price shares on June 11 before a June 12 trading debut.

What does this mean for the Hong Kong IPO market 2026 rankings? Straightforwardly: HKEX is almost certain to finish the year in second or third place, not first. Even under PwC’s bullish forecast — HKD 320–350 billion in total 2026 proceeds, approximately $41–45 billion — that figure falls short of SpaceX’s $75 billion target. A single private aerospace company raising more capital than the entire Hong Kong exchange raises in a year is not a competitive scenario; it’s a category event.

John Lee Chen-kwok, vice-chairman and co-head of Asia coverage at UBS in Hong Kong, acknowledged as much while choosing measured optimism: Hong Kong’s main board, he said, could remain in the top three this year even accounting for the challenge posed by US exchanges. That is almost certainly where Hong Kong will land.

What This Reveals About Structural Depth vs. Gravitational Pull

Can Hong Kong maintain its IPO market ranking in 2026?

Hong Kong is highly likely to remain a top-three global IPO market in 2026, supported by a pipeline exceeding 300 active listing applications and structural A+H listing momentum. However, SpaceX’s planned $75 billion Nasdaq offering means the exchange will not retain the top global ranking, which it held in 2025 after a six-year absence. The critical distinction is between a temporary ranking loss — caused by a singular once-in-a-generation listing — and a structural decline. On current evidence, Hong Kong is experiencing the former.

The picture is more complicated, however, than a simple “SpaceX effect.”

There’s a legitimate debate about what IPO market rankings actually measure. Hong Kong’s 2025 triumph owed much to the A+H structure — a mechanism that doesn’t exist on Nasdaq and doesn’t transfer. A+H listings are available exclusively to Chinese mainland companies that are already publicly traded on the Shanghai or Shenzhen exchanges and want offshore capital. They’re structurally embedded in the China-Hong Kong capital corridor in ways that no US exchange can replicate. KPMG’s full-year 2025 analysis found that A+H listings accounted for more than half of total Hong Kong IPO funds raised — a structural bedrock that insulates the market against competition in ways that headline rankings obscure.

Yet the same analysis exposes a vulnerability. A markets ledger built substantially on a single deal type — however structurally sound — remains sensitive to supply-side disruption. Beijing’s pace of approval for A+H candidates, capital controls, US–China geopolitical temperature, and the health of mainland equity markets all exert pressure on the same structural mechanism. The exchange is not diversified in the way, say, the NYSE is diversified.

That asymmetry matters when a US exchange can attract a $75 billion offering in a sector — commercial aerospace — where Hong Kong has essentially no issuer base at all. HKEX’s own March 2026 competitiveness consultation paper acknowledged that Greater China issuers typically choose between Hong Kong and the US, and that US regulatory developments bear more directly on HKEX competitiveness than developments in other non-US markets. The document was an unusually candid self-assessment from a regulator that had just reclaimed a global crown.

The Reform Agenda That SpaceX Just Made More Urgent

The SpaceX filing arrives at a moment when HKEX was already deep in the most ambitious overhaul of its listing rules in nearly a decade.

In March 2026, HKEX proposed a suite of reforms that, taken together, signal genuine structural ambition: halving the minimum valuation threshold for companies with weighted voting rights from HK$40 billion to HK$20 billion (approximately $2.6 billion); reducing the minimum market capitalisation for the revenue-based listing route; and — critically — allowing all IPO applicants to file prospectuses confidentially, a practice already standard in the United States.

That last reform is more significant than it sounds. Confidential filing allows companies to test regulatory appetite and valuation before committing publicly to a listing, reducing reputational risk. It was one of the specific advantages that US exchanges have historically held over Hong Kong in attracting high-growth technology companies wary of the spotlight that public-draft filings create. The irony is that SpaceX — which filed its S-1 confidentially with the SEC in April before going public — is the paradigmatic beneficiary of exactly the kind of process HKEX is now trying to replicate.

The biotech sector tells a similar story of structural deepening. DLA Piper’s 2026 market outlook noted that Hong Kong’s biotech index outperformed its Nasdaq counterpart by a wide margin in 2025 — rising nearly 100% compared to Nasdaq’s 20–30% gain — drawing global investors attracted by both the returns and the comparatively lower entry valuations. Since the introduction of Chapter 18A, which allows pre-revenue biotech companies to list in Hong Kong, more than 80 companies have joined the exchange. That ecosystem has reach in sectors adjacent to the kind of deep-tech companies that HKEX wants to attract through its newest listing channel, the Technology Enterprises Channel (TECH).

Still, the SpaceX listing clarifies the ceiling. HKEX’s structural reforms are necessary but insufficient to compete for capital-raising events of this magnitude. Elon Musk’s company didn’t choose Nasdaq because Hong Kong’s listing rules were too restrictive. It chose Nasdaq because it’s an American company, its investors are American, and the infrastructure — banks, lawyers, institutional relationships — for listing America’s largest companies runs through Wall Street, not Admiralty.

The Case for Not Panicking

Edward Au, southern region managing partner at Deloitte China, put the tension clearly at an April press conference: “The tide could change quickly,” he said, noting that US mega IPOs in AI and the space sector “could shift the global rankings quite easily.” He was right — and that’s precisely the argument for measured perspective rather than alarm.

Rankings are not destiny. Hong Kong finished fifth in 2024, first in 2025, and will likely finish second or third in 2026. What that volatility reveals is not structural fragility but the inherent lumpiness of large-cap IPO activity — a reality that affects every exchange, including Nasdaq, including the NYSE.

The deeper argument for Hong Kong’s resilience rests on the demand side. LSEG data shows more than 300 active IPO applications were in HKEX’s pipeline as of late 2025, including 92 A+H applicants alone. KPMG projects that number could grow. The listing queue for Chinese artificial intelligence companies — including names like Zhipu AI and MiniMax, which passed HKEX listing hearings in late 2025 — represents genuine, durable demand for Hong Kong as an international capital gateway. None of that pipeline disappears because SpaceX lists in New York.

JPMorgan, alongside UBS, has maintained its bullish posture on Hong Kong’s market, noting continued strong investor appetite for mainland technology and other listing candidates driven by the outlook for the Chinese economy.

There is also the question of what global investors actually want. For those seeking exposure to Chinese technology, innovation, and the mainland economy, Hong Kong is not interchangeable with Nasdaq. SpaceX’s Nasdaq listing will attract a specific class of investor with a specific risk appetite. The investors bidding for MiniMax’s Hong Kong IPO are playing a different game entirely.

A Crown, Not a Kingdom

The world’s largest IPO market in any given year is ultimately a title determined by a handful of very large deals. Hong Kong learned this in 2019, when a run of mainland mega-listings briefly carried it to the top. It learned it again in 2021, during the boom. And it’s relearning it now — this time, watching the crown travel in the other direction.

What HKEX has built since 2022, however, is something more durable than a rankings trophy: a reformed listing architecture, a deepening technology pipeline, and a structural A+H corridor with mainland China that no other exchange can replicate. None of that is erased by SpaceX’s June flotation.

The honest assessment is that Hong Kong’s IPO revival was always going to be tested by the gravitational pull of US capital markets when something genuinely historic came along. Something genuinely historic has now come along.

Whether the city’s exchange has built enough structural depth to absorb that gravity — and continue growing in its aftermath — is the question that matters for 2027 and beyond. On current trajectory, the answer looks more durable than the rankings suggest.

The crown moves. The architecture stays.