Londian Wason (FOIL): China's Copper Foil Giant Lists on the NYSE

TL;DR

• Londian Wason (NYSE: FOIL), the world's largest maker of copper foil for lithium-ion batteries by 2025 sales volume, priced its NYSE IPO at $22 per ADS, the top of its range, and starts trading today.
• The deal was upsized from a roughly $75 million target to $94.3 million in gross proceeds, putting the Shenzhen company's market cap near $1.7 billion.
• Reuters reported this could be the biggest New York listing of a Chinese company in more than a year, and China's securities regulator cleared it in December, one of only a handful of US listing approvals it has granted since.
• FY2025 revenue grew 24.9% to $1.56 billion and the company swung to a $2.9 million profit from roughly a $42 million loss the year before, though gross margin is a thin 6.6%.
• The float is small, roughly 5% of shares outstanding, and the company carries $1.36 billion of combined borrowings against a working-capital deficit. This is a name that can move a lot on very little volume.

The Board

Londian Wason's IPO terms and FY2025 financials, sourced from the F-1/A prospectus and the pricing release.

What Copper Foil Actually Is

Electrolytic copper foil is the thin conductive sheet that sits inside every lithium-ion battery as the anode current collector. It doesn't store energy itself. It's the wiring the anode material clings to. Every EV battery pack, every grid storage container, every Tesla Powerwall has some company's copper foil rolled into the cell.

Londian Wason makes more of it than anyone. According to a Frost & Sullivan report the company commissioned for the offering, it sold 111,985 metric tons of lithium-ion battery copper foil in 2025, a 7.6% global share and the largest volume of any single producer, running roughly 180,500 metric tons of annual capacity out of Shenzhen. The prospectus lists CATL, BYD, LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI and Panasonic among its customers, which is close to the entire list of companies that matter in EV batteries.

That is the bull case in one sentence: if you believe EVs and grid storage keep growing, someone has to sell the foil, and this is the company selling the most of it.

The Deal: Priced at the Top, Then Made Bigger

Londian Wason filed to raise about $75 million, offering roughly 3.6 million ADSs (each ADS equals five ordinary shares) in a $20 to $22 range. It priced at $22, the top, and the bankers upsized the deal to roughly 4.3 million ADSs, pulling in $94.3 million gross and about $87.0 million net after fees. Underwriters have a 30-day option on another 642,857 ADSs if demand holds.

Cantor Fitzgerald led the book, with Huatai Securities, CMB International and US Tiger Securities as joint bookrunners and Fortune Securities, VC Brokerage and BOCOM International as co-managers. According to the prospectus, cornerstone investors indicated interest for most of the deal before it even opened: Harvest Global Capital Investments for $50 million, battery maker Hithium Global for $7 million, and other investors for roughly $30 million combined. That's close to $87 million of demand lined up against a $94.3 million raise. Existing backers include South Korea's SK Group and Mirae Asset.

The context matters more than the ticker. Chinese companies mostly stopped listing in New York over the past year as US-China tensions ground the pipeline down, and Beijing's own securities regulator has approved only a handful of outbound US listings since it cleared this one in December. IPOX Research's Lukas Muehlbauer told Reuters the company is "benefiting from growing battery demand and has recently returned to stronger growth and profitability," while flagging customer concentration as the thing to watch. If FOIL trades well this week, it is a data point for whether Chinese IPOs in the US are actually reopening, not just this one company's story.

The Numbers Behind the $1.7 Billion Tag

Revenue grew 24.9% to RMB 10.94 billion (about $1.56 billion) in FY2025 from RMB 8.76 billion the year before, per the prospectus. Net income flipped from a roughly RMB 293 million ($42 million) loss in 2024 to a small RMB 20.3 million ($2.9 million) profit in 2025, and gross margin expanded from 4.3% to 6.6%. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP figure the company defines itself, came in at RMB 868.9 million ($124 million).

I'd call that a real business turning the corner, not a growth story. A 6.6% gross margin leaves almost nothing to absorb a copper price swing or a customer pushing back on terms, and the five largest customers made up 63.6% of 2025 revenue and 64.1% of receivables at year-end. Lose one of CATL or BYD's contracts and the income statement notices immediately.

The balance sheet is the part I'd want answered before anything else. The company carries roughly $1.36 billion in combined borrowings, with interest expense that reportedly exceeds 2025 operating income, and current liabilities that exceed current assets by about $128.3 million. A capital-intensive foil manufacturer running that much leverage against a single-digit margin is not automatically a problem, plenty of Chinese industrials run this way, but it means the equity story depends on refinancing staying cheap and orderly.

The Float Problem

Roughly 5% of Londian Wason's shares are in public hands at listing, based on the prospectus's post-offering share count of about 387 million ordinary shares against the roughly 21.5 million shares sold in ADS form. That's a small float on a name most US investors have never heard of, trading for the first time today.

We've written about what that combination does to a stock before: T3 Defense traded on a float of 1.12 million shares and moved on volume that would be a rounding error for a normal-size company. A 5% float isn't that extreme, but it's thin enough that early price action here will say more about who wants in and who's flipping the IPO allocation than about the copper foil business. Don't read the first few days as a verdict on the company.

The Options Angle

There's no chain to trade yet. Fresh IPOs typically don't get listed options for about a week, the same gap we flagged when SK Hynix debuted on Nasdaq last month, and a $94 million deal with a 5% float is an even less likely candidate for an early listing. There's nothing to price, and nothing worth pricing off two hours of trading in an illiquid name anyway.

Trade log

#	Stance	Structure	Strikes and expiry	Cost or credit	Spot at writing	Implied move	Breakeven
1	Pass	No chain listed yet	N/A	N/A	$22.00 IPO price (pre-open)	Unknown, no IV yet	N/A

The One-Line Read

Londian Wason is a real, growing, thin-margin business with the customer list to matter and the balance sheet to worry about, wrapped in a small-float Chinese IPO that New York hasn't seen the likes of in over a year, so watch what the stock does once the cornerstone money settles in before treating day-one price action as anything more than noise.