Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets, and the world economy.
Online fashion giant Shein is heading closer towards floating on the London stock market – a boost for the City, after the company’s efforts to list in New York hit a snag.
Shein, which was recently valued at $66bn (£52bn), is planning to file a confidential prospectus with the City regulator this month, according to several reports this morning.
This would take it a step closer to a London listing, and let it list more quickly if it decides to take the plunge – perhaps this summer, or in the autumn.
Sky News reported last night that the confidential filing could take place as soon as the coming week, although it could yet take place later this month.
Shein had initially aimed for a Wall Street float, but those ambitions have been rocked by political opposition as tensions between Washington and Beijing have escalated.
Shein, which launched as SheInside in 2011 in Nanjing, China, has taken the fashion world by storm, offering a very wide range of very affordable clothing.
As my colleague Nicole Lipman explained in April:
On today’s “New In” page, there are 8,640 items (yesterday there were 8,760). The most expensive dress of the nearly 9,000 new arrivals – a floor-length, long-sleeved, fully sequinned plus-size gown, available in five sparkly colours – is $67. The cheapest – a short, tight piece of polyester with spaghetti straps, a cowl neckline and an all-over print of Renaissance-style flowers and cherubs – is $7.
I can buy casual dresses, going-out tops, workout leggings, winter parkas, pink terry-cloth hooded rompers, purple double-breasted suit jackets with matching trousers, red pleather straight-leg pants, cropped cardigans with mushroom embroidery, black sheer lace thongs and rhinestone-trimmed hijabs. I can buy a wedding dress for $37. I can buy clothes for school, work, basketball games, proms, funerals, nightclubs, sex clubs. I see patchwork-printed overalls and black bikinis with rhinestones in the shape of a skull over each nipple designated as “punk”. I can buy Christian-girl modesty clothing and borderline fetish wear.
In the grid of product listings, a yellow rectangle indicates if a product is trending: “Trending-Plazacore”, “Trending-Western”, “Trending-Mermaidcore”, and “Trending-Y2K” tags all appear in the new arrivals….
But, Shein’s high-octane ‘test and repeat’ model – in which it churns out thousands of new products a day – is also controversial, and seen the company dubbed “the unacceptable face of throwaway fast fashion”.
Shein has also been accused of using forced labour to produce its low-cost garments. In 2022, Bloomberg discovered that garments shipped to the US by Shein were made with cotton from the Xinjiang region, where China is accused of “serious human rights violations” against the Uyghur Muslim people.
But that probably won’t deter the City from embracing Shein, given the well-documented concerns that the London market is in crisis as some firms shift their listings across the Atlantic.
Also coming up today
It’s a busy day for economic news, with new surveys of factory bosses across the world giving a healthcheck on global manufacturing.
Traders are digesting yesterday’s Opec+ meeting, where oil producers agreed to extend their production cuts into 2025.
Tensions are rising in South Wales, where union leaders are preparing to ramp up industrial action at two steelworks, in a further escalation of a row over almost 3,000 job losses that threatens to become a big general election issue.
And in France, the government has been stung by a credit rating downgrade by S&P Global on Friday night, from AA to AA- with a stable outlook.
S&P Global cited France’s rising debts and lower-than-expected growth – a blow to Emmanuel Macron’s stewardship of the economy…
The agenda
7am BST: Russia’s manufacturing PMI for May
9am BST: Eurozone manufacturing PMI for May
9.30am BST: UK manufacturing PMI for May
3pm BST: US manufacturing PMI for May