Shein is scheduled to face the Hong Kong stock exchange’s listing committee on Thursday, Reuters reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. It is the final procedural gate before the fast-fashion group, which has spent three years and two continents trying to go public, can actually price a deal.
The hearing follows approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission last Friday, which cleared Shein to issue up to 341.6 million H shares and gave it 12 months to complete the listing. That approval was the hard part, and it took a long time coming.
New York was the first plan, then London. Both collapsed under regulatory and political weight, and Hong Kong is what remains: a market Beijing controls, for a company Beijing was never going to let list anywhere it did not.
A listing in September or October is the working assumption, according to people cited by Reuters, though nothing has been confirmed by the company. Shein has declined to comment publicly on the timetable, and neither the exchange nor the company has announced the hearing date.
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The mechanics from here are routine. Clearing the listing committee lets Shein publish its prospectus, run investor roadshows, and set a price range, which is where the argument the company has been having privately with its own shareholders becomes public.
The valuation is where the story gets uncomfortable. Shein was worth around $100bn four years ago. Reports of the current target range from roughly $40bn to $50bn, and shareholders have reportedly pushed for a number closer to $30bn, which would represent a two-thirds haircut on a business that is still, by revenue, enormous.
The reason for the markdown is not mysterious. It is written into trade policy on two continents.
The Trump administration ended the $800 de minimis exemption for Chinese imports in May 2025, replacing duty-free entry with a 54% tariff or a $100 flat fee per package, and the model Shein built, in which cheap parcels flew individually from Guangzhou to American doorsteps without touching a customs duty, stopped working overnight. The EU followed on 1 July, abolishing its own €150 exemption.
Temu, its closest rival, has reportedly lost more than half its daily US users since the American rules took effect. Shein does not disclose comparable figures, which is itself a kind of disclosure.
Beijing has been drafting a response, rewriting its e-commerce law to add both domestic platform oversight and legal countermeasures aimed at protecting its exporters from foreign tariffs and fines. That is the environment Shein is listing into: politically defended at home, structurally squeezed abroad.
The regulatory file is not clean either. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has been examining both Shein and Temu on consumer-protection and pricing-transparency grounds since 2024, and the Financial Conduct Authority reviewed Shein’s disclosures during the London attempt, which is part of why there is no London listing.
Nor is the company’s attention undivided. Shein is suing Temu in London’s High Court over what it calls industrial-scale copyright theft, a case that will air, in open court, precisely the questions about design provenance that fast fashion prefers to keep internal.
Meanwhile the ground is shifting underneath both of them. TikTok is building shopping, travel, and fintech into a single super app, and the discovery-to-checkout loop Shein pioneered is being rebuilt by a company that already owns the discovery half.
None of this stops the IPO. Hong Kong listing committee hearings are rarely where deals die, and Shein has cleared the regulator that mattered.
What Thursday determines is timing, not outcome. The valuation gets settled later, by a market that will price what Shein has left rather than what it once was.