- A planned IPO from Chinese livestreaming company Douyu may be delayed over trade tariff uncertainty.
- Tweets by American President Trump have caused a drop in world markets.
- The tariff discussions likely affected Huya’s IPO strategy last year.
Chinese livestreaming platform Douyu 
reportedly could put off its planned initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) amid fears of increased trade tariffs on Chinese products proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
As reported from Bloomberg, the company is considering a delay of its IPO by at least a week, just as the company was to begin its push across the United States to drum up support for the offering. The stock was originally supposed to start trading on May 16 under the stock symbol DOYU.
The news of a possible delay comes two weeks after Douyu filed an IPO application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in an effort to raise up to $500M USD. The company said in its prospectus that it plans to use the money raised to build on its success in the esports arena, while attracting more streamers and influencers.
President Trump announced via Twitter the intention of escalating the ongoing trade tariffs against $200B of China’s imports to 25% over the weekend, with the 25% tariff likely to hit an additional $325B in goods “shortly.”
Credit: Douyu
Global markets have fallen in the wake of the President’s tweet. As of this writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down almost 1%, as were the NASDAQ and S&P 500 Index. The Chinese market was down 5.5%.
Related Article: Douyu Files for a Potential $500M IPO at the New York Stock Exchange
Douyu is backed by Tencent Holdings , which invested $632M in Douyu in March 2018, and owns 40.1% of the current outstanding ordinary shares of the company through subsidiary Nectarine Investment.
President Trump’s ongoing trade war with China likely affected Chinese livestreaming company Huya last year when it had its IPO in May, raising $180M, but $20M less than the $200M it had hoped to pull in. In April, Huya announced a follow-on offering of 13.6 million American Depositary Shares (ADSs) at $24 a share and raised another $327M in capital for the company. Tencent is also a significant investor in Huya, owning 29.6% after the secondary offering.
