By Kane Wu, Helen Reid and Julie Zhu
HONG KONG/LONDON, July 27 (Reuters) – Shein’s draft prospectus for a Hong Kong listing, published on Sunday, offers rare details about the role of its reclusive founder and CEO, Sky Xu.
According to the prospectus, Xu, 42, has served as chairman, executive director and chief executive officer “since inception”, in addition to founding the company.
The document does not mention former banker and media executive Donald Tang, who has served as Shein’s executive chairman and public face as it pursued listings in New York and London in recent years.
The fast-fashion giant’s planned Hong Kong initial public offering marks its third attempt to go public after previous attempts floundered.
Founded in China in 2012 as Sheinside, Shein is nearing a listing that could value it at up to $50 billion, yet Xu remains extremely private and difficult to access. He has avoided interviews and public events and has no visible online presence.
Shein has declined Reuters’ repeated requests for an interview with Xu and did not respond to questions about the founder and CEO.
Shein has said it aims to increase transparency, but Xu does not feature on its corporate website, where a governance section contains no information about who owns or leads the company.
Western stakeholders have not always welcomed Xu’s aloofness. The lack of public information about Shein’s leadership contributed to concerns about its IPO among politicians and campaigners in the United States and Britain.
Xu briefly stepped into the spotlight in February, delivering a speech to policymakers at the Guangdong High-Quality Development Conference about Shein’s investments in its supply chain, which is concentrated among thousands of garment factories in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
SCANT PUBLIC DETAIL ABOUT XU
Xu was born in 1984 in Zibo, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province. Little else is known about his early years or education, although several Chinese media reports said his mother was a garment factory worker, potentially giving him an early insight into the industry he would later help shape.
According to the prospectus, Xu and Shein’s three co-founders — Maggie Gu, Molly Miao and Tony Ren — previously worked together at a company that provided search engine marketing services to exporters.
The filing also said Xu received a bachelor’s degree in international trade from Qingdao University of Technology in 2007.
According to Shein’s first sustainability report, published in 2022, Xu initially chose Chris as his English name but later changed it to Sky because he felt Chris was not distinctive enough. Sky derives from one of the characters in his Chinese name, Xu Yangtian.
An industry source who has known Xu for years described him as patient, modest and pragmatic. One of China’s most prolific collectors of antique coins, Xu remains deeply involved in Shein’s day-to-day operations despite its scale, the source said.
Xu has also made strategic decisions that benefited the company despite short-term disruption, the source said, pointing to his 2015 decision to rebrand the company as Shein despite its already significant user base and online traffic.
Despite Shein’s growing global profile, Xu hesitated for years about taking the company public, the source said, believing it should not rely on outside financing to compete with rivals, particularly PDD Holdings’ discount shopping platform Temu.
As Shein expanded overseas, the company took steps to distance itself from China. In 2022, it moved its headquarters to Singapore, although its suppliers and warehouses largely remain in China.
Staying under the radar may be strategic, a second source close to Xu said, if he wants to minimise the risk of a Chinese government crackdown similar to the one that engulfed Alibaba founder Jack Ma in November 2020, when regulators derailed Ant Group’s $37 billion IPO.
(Reporting by Julie Zhu and Kane Wu in Hong Kong and Helen Reid in London, Editing by Lisa Jucca, Adam Jourdan, Susan Fenton and Michael Perry)
