Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Richard Liu, founder and chairman of JD.com, during an IPO ceremony at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., on May 22, 2014.
Although U.S. investors may be more familiar with China’s big-name tech players like Alibaba and JD.com, the IPO market is really led by a “wide swathe” of businesses from Asia’s largest economy, according to McCooey.
Some of those companies play in “terrific” sectors such as life sciences, e-commerce, and education — the last of which is particularly popular in China, the senior vice president said.
Nonetheless, the rising tide of IPO activity does not mean there’s likely to be a flood of Chinese companies into the Nasdaq, McCooey said.
“We’re only going to have a small number of companies from the [Asia-Pacific] region that will come to our market anyway. They are companies that are in certain sectors [and] have global aspirations,” he said, adding that the stock exchange will not “try to convince companies who belong in the local markets not to go to the local markets.”
