ONE Championship Set For IPO

ONE Championship is set for an IPO (Initial Public Offering) in the United States after raising an additional $150 million last December, according to Bloomberg. The article stated that the new investment had increased the company’s valuation to $1.35 billion.

Group ONE Holdings, the company that owns ONE Championship, will also be changing its legal domicile from Singapore to Cayman Islands. The new round of investments was led by Guggenheim Investments and Qatar Investment Authority.

The latter is Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and currently owns Ligue 1 champions Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). The country has invested huge amounts of money in order to host this year’s World Cup.

Since PSG was acquired hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into the club allowing it to purchase players like Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. The team had not won Ligue 1 since 1993 until the Qataris came along in 2011.

PSG has now won Ligue 1 eight times in the last 10 years and reached the final of the Champion’s League thanks to the Qatari’s investment. The $263mn spent on signing Neymar in 2007 remains a record transfer fee.

It will be interesting to see whether ONE Championship looks to go on a similar spending spree. The promotion has already signed several UFC veterans including Eddie Alvarez, Demetrious Johnson, and Sage Northcutt.

It will also be interesting to see whether this leads to ONE Championship putting on more events in the Middle East. To date there has been just one event there which took place in Dubai back in 2014.

“We’re entering a new stage of global growth, which means structuring the company appropriately to take advantage of the various strategic opportunities ahead of us,” Hua Fung Teh, president of Group One, said in an interview.

For the past two years ONE Championship has been holding events exclusively in Singapore as a response to COVID-19 restrictions. But the promotion is set to return to Tokyo in November.

Events are being broadcast live in North America on the Amazon Prime platform every month. The third one of these cards is heading to Tokyo while the first two are set for Singapore and will feature the likes of Demetrious Johnson and Angela Lee.