Nigel Farage and I agree on one thing: a red-carpet welcome at the London Stock Exchange for Shein, the Chinese online fashion retailer, would be ‘a very bad idea’. Valued at £50 billion, Shein could become London’s biggest-ever initial public offering. Both the departing Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and the shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds have met Shein’s chairman, Donald Tang, to encourage that prospect. Both clearly recognise that the City’s global status is weakened by a dearth of LSE debutants and a fad for listing in New York instead – with yet another FTSE 100 company, the £24 billion plant-hire giant Ashtead, reported to be thinking of shifting its listing across the Atlantic.
But could Shein turn the tide? Not according to Farage, who thinks what the LSE really needs is deregulation to free it from residual EU shackles. And not according to human-rights watchers, who observe that Shein is thinking about coming here only because its plans for a New York launch have been blocked by critics over there.
Founded in Nanjing in 2008 but now headquartered in Singapore, Shein grew to be the world’s largest clothing retailer by harvesting consumer data through social media channels and responding to fashion whims by rapid sourcing of cheap garments from third-party factories across mainland China. That business model gives rise to obvious environmental concerns. More significantly, a group of US congressmen wrote last year to the Securities and Exchange Commission accusing Shein of ‘utilising underpaid labour in its supplier factories’ – possibly (though Shein strongly denies the allegation) including Uighur forced labour in Xinjiang province.
‘The ability to issue securities on our domestic exchanges is a privilege and foreign companies wishing to do so must uphold a commitment to human rights,’ wrote the congressmen.
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