SenseTime Group, a Chinese artificial intelligence start-up, relaunched its $767 million Hong Kong IPO on Monday, a week after pulling the listing due to the company's inclusion on a U.S. investment blacklist.
According to regulatory filings, SenseTime has maintained its target of selling 1.5 billion shares for between HK$3.85 and $HK3.99 per share, with the final price to be determined on Thursday.
However, it will now rely on cornerstone investors to buy about $511 million, or around 67%, of shares, up from $450 million, or 58%, of shares previously.
SenseTime stated that its inclusion on the US blacklist had no impact on its business operations
but that the resulting lack of US investors could impede its ability to raise capital in the future and reduce trading liquidity.
On December 10, the United States Treasury added SenseTime to a list of "Chinese military-industrial complex companies," accusing it of developing a facial recognition program to determine a target's ethnicity, with a focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs.
According to UN experts and rights groups, over a million people, mostly Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minorities, have been detained in a vast network of camps in China's far-western region of Xinjiang in recent years.
Some foreign lawmakers and parliaments have labeled Uyghur treatment as genocide, citing evidence of forced sterilizations and deaths inside the camps. China refutes these claims, claiming that Uyghur population growth rates are higher than the national average.
"Our group's products and services are intended for civilian and commercial uses only, not for military applications," SenseTime stated in revised filings on Monday.
The company previously stated that it "strongly opposed" the blacklist designation and that the accusations leveled against it were unfounded.
On December 30, SenseTime's shares will begin trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.