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Sept. 4 (NBD) -- China's top hotpot chain Haidilao International Holding Ltd. ("Haidilao") has passed the listing hearing and updated its prospectus for initial public offering (IPO) on Monday. 

The restaurant chain filed the application in May this year to list in Hong Kong, and CMB International and Goldman Sachs are joint sponsors of the offering. 

According to the updated filing, Haidilao now operates 362 restaurants at home and abroad and serves more than 100 million guests a year. 

The revenue that the restaurant chain generated increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.9 percent from 5.76 billion yuan (844.8 million U.S. dollars) in 2015 to 10.64 billion yuan (1.6 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017.

A report released by Frost & Sullivan revealed that Haidilao was the top Chinese cuisine restaurant in both domestic and global market last year by revenue and growth rate.

In the first six months of 2018, the hotpot chain's revenue increased 54.4 percent year on year to 7.34 billion yuan (1.1 billion U.S. dollars), which was mainly contributed by earnings from its restaurants located in second- and third-tier cities. 

The filing shows that the company posted 1.42 billion yuan (208.3 million U.S. dollars) of operating profit in the first six months of 2018, 774.75 million yuan (113.6 million U.S. dollars) of which was from restaurants in second-tier cities and 276.32 million yuan (40.5 million U.S. dollars) from those in third-tier cities. 

Besides, the overall table turnover rate was 4.9 times per day in the first half of this year. Restaurants in second-tier cities reported the highest table turnover rate of 5.1 times per day. 

NBD noticed that the table turnover rate for the 71 newly-opened Haidilao restaurants in the period was 4.2 times per day. The company explained that the majority of those restaurants were opened in the second quarter of 2018 and were in a ramp-up stage. In contrast, the metric was 4.8 times per day for the same period of the previous year.

Moreover, the chain's same store sales growth was 6.4 percent in the January-June period of this year.

The rapidly expanding hotpot chain benefits from the boom of China's catering service market. The market hit around 3.96 trillion yuan (580.8 billion U.S. dollars) in revenue in 2017, surging from 2.64 trillion yuan (387.2 billion U.S. dollars) in 2013 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7 percent.

Among all Chinese cuisines, hotpot grabbed the largest market share by revenue last year. China's hotpot market is forecasted to reap 707.7 billion yuan (103.8 billion U.S. dollars) in revenue by 2022 at a CAGR of 10.2 percent.

Email: zhanglingxiao@nbd.com.cn