2020-10-27 11:23:33
One of China’s most influential tech companies, the internet finance titan Ant Group, is poised to raise a boatload of cash by selling shares.
中国最具影响力的科技公司之一、互联网金融巨头蚂蚁集团准备通过发行股票筹集大量现金。
The sale puts another stamp on China’s importance as a digital powerhouse. But it also shows how the tech world is fracturing.
它的上市再次印证了中国作为数字大国的重要性。但也显示出科技世界是如何分裂的。
The company could be worth more than many global banks after its share sale, yet its business is highly concentrated in just one country: China. Instead of listing in New York, as many other Chinese internet companies have done, Ant is going public in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
发行股票后，该公司的市值可能超过许多全球银行，但其业务都高度集中在一个国家：中国。蚂蚁集团没有像其他许多中国互联网企业那样在纽约上市，而是选择了香港和上海。
Here’s what to know about the company and its initial public offering.
以下是关于这家公司及其首次公开募股的一些信息。
Ant is Jack Ma’s second tech giant.
蚂蚁集团是马云创建的第二个科技巨头公司。
Around the turn of the millennium, the internet was a lawless frontier, not least in China. Online shopping was a gamble. Buying and selling took place largely between strangers. Nobody could be sure they weren’t being defrauded.
新世纪之交，互联网还是一个不受法律约束的前沿领域，尤其是在中国。网络购物就是一场赌博。买卖主要发生在陌生人之间。没人能肯定自己不被骗。
Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce group, had an idea for cultivating trust. In 2003, it created a service called Alipay that held on to payments until buyers confirmed that they were satisfied with their purchases. If the items were fake or never arrived, the money was refunded.
中国的电商集团阿里巴巴有了一个培养信任度的想法。2003年，阿里巴巴推出了一项名叫支付宝的服务，让买家可以在确认对所购商品满意之前延期付款。如果商品是假的或从未送达，他们的钱会被退还。
Alipay helped Alibaba’s bazaars take off. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s co-founder, spun the service out in 2011 as a separate company, setting off a tiff with Yahoo, which was then a major Alibaba investor.
支付宝让阿里巴巴打造的集市就此腾飞。2011年，阿里巴巴联合创始人马云将支付宝剥离出来，成为一家独立公司，引发了与雅虎的争吵，后者是当时阿里巴巴的主要投资者。
Today, Alibaba owns a one-third stake in Ant. Mr. Ma is Ant’s controlling shareholder, though he is not part of its management.
如今，阿里巴巴持有蚂蚁集团三分之一的股份。马云是其控股股东，但他不是该公司管理层的成员。
Ant’s executive chairman, Eric Jing, and chief executive, Simon Hu, both worked for years in Alibaba’s orbit. Ant has 16,660 employees.
蚂蚁集团董事长井贤栋和首席执行官胡晓明都在阿里巴巴旗下工作了很多年。蚂蚁集团拥有16660名员工。
Life is different with Alipay.
支付宝改变了生活。
When people across China want to pay for something, they don’t reach for their wallets. They grab their phones.
当中国各地的人们想要为某样东西付钱的时候，他们不会掏出钱包。而是拿起自己的手机。
With Alipay and another smartphone app, the social platform WeChat, exchanging money is a matter of scanning a QR code — at an in-person cashier, during checkout at an online store or face-to-face with a friend. Shops and restaurants still accept cash, though often begrudgingly.
有了支付宝和另一款智能手机应用——社交平台微信，收付款只需扫描二维码，不管是面对收银员，还是在网上商店，或是与朋友面对面。商店和餐馆仍接受现金，尽管通常都不太情愿。
Over time, Alipay has come to host other services, too. People in China use it to shop on credit — no plastic card required. They take out small loans, invest their savings and buy health and life insurance. Fees from those businesses accounted for more than half of Ant’s revenue last year.
随着时间推移，支付宝也开始提供其他服务。中国人可以用它提供的信用——无需塑料卡片——购物。人们用它申请小额贷款、储蓄理财、购买健康和人寿保险。去年，来自这些业务的手续费占到蚂蚁集团总收入的一半以上。
The app is a big deal in China.
这款应用在中国很受欢迎。
Alipay has more than 730 million monthly users, more than twice the population of the United States. By comparison, PayPal has 346 million active accounts.
支付宝的月活用户超过7.3亿，是美国人口的两倍多。相比之下，贝宝(PayPal)有3.46亿活跃账户。
Ant handled more than $17 trillion in digital payments in mainland China during the 12 months that ended in June. PayPal says its total payment volume in 2019 was $712 billion. Ant also enabled around $300 billion in credit to consumers and small businesses.
截至今年6月的12个月里，蚂蚁集团在中国大陆处理了超过17万亿美元的数字支付。贝宝表示，其2019年的全年支付总额为7120亿美元。蚂蚁集团还为消费者和小企业提供了约3000亿美元的信贷。
When the company goes public, it could be valued around $310 billion. That would make it worth about as much as JPMorgan Chase, and much more than Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
该公司上市后，其估值可能在3100亿美元左右。这将使其市值与摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)相当，远高于花旗集团(Citigroup)和高盛(Goldman Sachs)。
Alipay is no slouch technologically, either. Ant says its systems processed 459,000 payments a second at the peak of a Chinese shopping holiday last year. Visa, by contrast, says it can handle 65,000 transactions a second.
在技术层面，支付宝也毫不逊色。蚂蚁集团表示，在去年中国一个购物节的高峰节点，其系统每秒处理了45.9万笔支付。相比之下，Visa称其每秒可处理6.5万笔交易。
Ant is huge not only because China’s population is huge. Its growth was also helped by the fact that China had previously been so far behind in digital finance. Few people had credit cards. The big government-run banks were slow to modernize.
蚂蚁集团规模之所以庞大，不仅是因为中国人口众多。中国以前在数字金融方面远远落后的现实，也推动了其增长。很少有人持有信用卡。大型国有银行的现代化进程缓慢。
But how much bigger can it get?
它还能扩张到什么程度？
Around 95 percent of Ant’s revenue last year came from mainland China. The company has invested in Paytm, an Indian payment app, and acquired EyeVerify, a start-up in Kansas City, Mo., that makes biometric authentication technology. But for now at least, Alipay seems unlikely to implant itself so deeply in another country’s financial system.
去年，蚂蚁集团大约95%的收入来自中国大陆。该公司投资了印度支付应用Paytm，并收购了密苏里州堪萨斯城一家开发生物识别技术的初创企业EyeVerify。但至少就目前而言，支付宝似乎不太可能如此深入地融入另一个国家的金融体系。
Even in China, the government is wary about fast-growing financial products. The Communist Party has clamped down on lending fraud and questionable investment schemes. Regulators have also criticized Ant for not adequately protecting users’ personal data.
即使在中国，政府对快速增长的金融产品也持谨慎态度。共产党严厉打击了贷款欺诈和可疑的投资计划。监管机构还批评蚂蚁集团没有充分保护用户的个人数据。
The fact that Ant has survived for so long in China under regulatory pressure means it will probably continue working around whatever the authorities throw at it, said Kevin Kwek, an analyst with the research firm Bernstein.
研究公司伯恩斯坦(Bernstein)的分析师凯文·科维克(Kevin Kwek)表示，蚂蚁集团在中国监管压力下存活了这么长时间，表明对当局的任何要求，它还是可能会找到解决办法。
“If you’re going to sell anything to consumers that’s financial services, the regulators have to scrutinize it,” he said. “I don’t think they’re trying to find ways to kill Ant.”
“如果你打算向消费者出售任何金融服务，监管机构都必须对其进行审查，”他说。“我不认为他们是在寻找扼杀蚂蚁集团的方法。”
Raymond Zhong是《纽约时报》科技记者。在2017年加入时报前，他在新德里为《华尔街日报》报道印度快速增长的经济。欢迎在Twitter上关注他 @zhonggg。
翻译：Harry Wong
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