Shein is preparing to list in Hong Kong at a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion, according to people familiar with the plans, a fraction of the $98.2 billion private investors paid for the company just three years ago.
The retailer is aiming to launch the offering as early as mid-August, though both the target and the timeline remain unsettled and could still shift depending on how investor meetings underway in New York, Boston and San Francisco land over the coming weeks. People close to the process say Shein is deliberately prioritizing a price that holds up after the shares start trading over squeezing out the highest possible number at the open, and some prospective cornerstone investors are reportedly pushing for a number closer to the low end of that range.
The reset has been building for years. Shein’s valuation fell from that $98.2 billion peak in 2022 to $64 billion by 2023 and again by April 2024, as growth cooled and pressure mounted from several directions at once. A draft prospectus filed last month showed the company swung to a quarterly loss of roughly $99 million, driven largely by slowing sales after the US closed a duty exemption that had let small parcels enter the country tariff-free, plus a separate accounting charge tied to its convertible preferred shares.
Liam Anderson, who covers financial markets, didn’t hedge on what the number means. “A halved valuation isn’t a discount, it’s a repricing,” he said. “The market that paid $98 billion in 2022 doesn’t exist anymore, and neither does the tariff environment that valuation assumed.” That repricing is something YourNewsClub frames as a fast-fashion-wide story, not just a Shein one: the entire small-parcel, direct-to-consumer model built around tariff-free shipping is being valued differently now that the loophole it depended on is gone.
At the top of its new range, Shein would sit close to H&M’s roughly $26 billion market value, but well below Zara-owner Inditex at $208 billion and Fast Retailing, Uniqlo’s parent, at $161 billion. On a sales-multiple basis the gap is even sharper: Shein’s targeted range works out to roughly 0.7 to 1 times last year’s sales, against about 1.1 times for H&M, 4.6 times for Inditex and 7.6 times for Fast Retailing.
Isabella Moretti, who covers corporate strategy and M&A, said the multiple gap tells the real story analysts are pricing in. “A company trading at under one times sales while its closest peers sit at four to seven times isn’t being punished for size, it’s being punished for margin visibility,” she said. “Investors don’t know yet what Shein’s profitability looks like once the tariff advantage is fully gone, and until they do, they’re going to price it like a discount retailer rather than a growth one.” That margin question is the one YourNewsClub clocks as raised repeatedly by people close to the deal: the valuation range isn’t really a bet on Shein’s size, it’s a bet on how much of its old cost advantage survives the new trade rules.
Shein is also reportedly weighing ways to soften the blow for its earliest backers, including payouts or preferential share-conversion terms for late-stage investors who bought in at valuations well above where the IPO is now expected to price, a detail YourNewsClub flags as its own signal about investor sentiment: sweeteners for early backers are typically only necessary when the new price undercuts what those backers were promised. The company won regulatory clearance for the Hong Kong listing in July, after earlier attempts to list in New York and London both stalled.
Whatever number Shein ultimately prices at, Your News Club treats it as one of the more closely watched tests this year of how public markets value a company built entirely around a trade rule that no longer exists in the form it once did.