Visitors check out the information boards in Kuaishou's booth during a high-tech exhibition in Beijing. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

It has been 70 days since Chinese online short video company Kuaishou officially submitted its listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. 

The company passed the stock exchange hearing on Jan 14, which means that the birth of the "first stock of short video" on the market is approaching.

According to the regular listing process, Kuaishou will have a roadshow at the end of January after the completion of the hearing and will be listed before Spring Festival. The estimated date is Feb 5. 

According to sources, Kuaishou confirmed its listing in Hong Kong, with a valuation made as early as October 2020 of approximately US$50 billion. The company's IPO is sponsored by the Bank of America, China Renaissance and Morgan Stanley.

It has been nearly two months since Kuaishou launched the listing. The company's goal is to be listed in the first quarter of 2021, but the specific time is still unknown. 

Kuaishou currently has over 776 million active monthly users and over 302 million active daily users, according to the prospectus. 

Each daily user has an average usage time of 85 minutes, averaged over more than 10 visits. 

Content creators account for 26 percent of the average monthly active users, and the average monthly upload volume of short videos exceeds 1.1 billion. The platform's huge content library already contained 26 billion short videos as of June 30, 2020.

Sociality has become a major feature of Kuaishou. Data show that by June 30, 2020 nearly 8 billion pairs of users were interacting on Kuaishou.

In addition, the prospectus also discloses a series of data on Kuaishou's business model and competitiveness: the company's GMV reached 109.6 billion in the first half of 2020, and the monthly repurchase rate of users exceeded 60 percent.

Across the globe, Kuaishou is the largest live streaming platform in terms of virtual gifts reward streaming and has the highest average of monthly paying live streaming users, the second largest short video platform in terms of average daily active users, and the second largest live streaming e-commerce platform in terms of total commodity transactions.

As for advertising revenue, data show that its advertising revenue was 7.16 billion yuan ($ 1.1 billion) as of June 30, 2020, accounting for 28.3 percent of total revenue, an increase of 222.5 percent over the same period last year. 

However, there is a significant gap between this position and that of Douyin, which had a 2020 advertising revenue target exceeding 90 billion yuan.

The short video market is showing a dichotomy between Kuaishou and Douyin. Though Douyin has certain advantages in terms of users and advertising revenue, Kuaishou will be the first to go public. How its valuation goes will be the next big suspense.