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Key Takeaways:
Spacety's 1.3 billion yuan ($190 million) fundraising and preliminary IPO preparation come as a growing number of Chinese commercial space companies target similar listings
Clearer rules from China's Nasdaq-style STAR Market and stronger policy support are helping drive that wave, even as steady profits remain elusive for most companies
Elon Musk's SpaceX and other space ventures have already reached a feat that China has yet to replicate, namely, turning rockets, satellites and space-based services into a financial story big enough to capture global investor attention. Mastering that skill is becoming increasingly important in China as a growing number of domestic space startups head toward public markets. The question now is no longer who can get something into orbit, but rather who can build a profitable business doing it.
That's what makes the latest move by satellite startup Spacety worth watching. The Changsha-based company earlier this month disclosed 1.3 billion yuan ($190 million) in fresh funding. It also entered IPO tutoring in early February with the Hunan securities regulator, a process that represents the first stage of moving towards an IPO on China's domestic A-share markets, according to a posting by one of its investors.
Spacety is a niche player focused on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites. While that's a niche area of the satellite universe, the company's story offers a window into where China's commercial-space sector is headed. That's because Spacety sits at the intersection of several of the industry's biggest themes: lower-cost hardware, data services and the still-unfinished search for a workable commercial model.
Spacety is far from alone among China's space sector companies racing to market. Rocket makers such as LandSpace and CAS Space have moved closest to listings, while others, including Space Pioneer, Galactic Energy and iSpace, are in the IPO process as well. The common destination is Shanghai's Nasdaq-style STAR Market, whose listing standards were widened last year to cover commercial aerospace. The result is that China's commercial-space sector is starting to look less like a collection of engineering experiments and more like a market taking shape. Notably, ...
