(Yicai Global) Nov. 2 -- Lufax Holding, one of the biggest US initial public offerings among Chinese firms this year, has slumped on its first day of trading amid broader sell-offs in New York.

Shares of Lufax [NYSE:LU], the online wealth management and lending arm of China's largest insurer Ping An Insurance Group, slid 4.81 percent to close at USD12.85 on Oct. 30 after opening as much as 14 percent lower than the IPO price of USD13.50. Its market cap stood at USD31.4 billion, more than 20 percent lower than its valuation in 2018. The NYSE Composite fell 0.58 percent the same day.

The personal finance services platform raised USD2.4 billion by offering 175 million American depositary shares. But other Chinese fintech firms are scheming for bigger IPOs this year. Ant Group is looking to raise USD35 billion in a dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong, while JD Digits is aiming for USD2.9 billion from a Shanghai debut.

Lufax began life as a peer-to-peer lending platform in 2011. But tightening regulation led it to exit the P2P field in July 2019. So it moved into consumer finance. The April opening of Ping An Consumer Finance, in which a unit of Lufax owns 70 percent, cleared a key hurdle to its listing, according to market insiders.

Lufax landed over USD3 billion in its first three funding rounds, valuing the company at USD39.4 billion after a C round in 2018. It secured more than USD9.1 billion in an international syndicated loan in April that was the largest of its kind so far this year.

Lufax made a net profit of CNY7.3 billion (USD1.1 billion) in the first half of this year on income of CNY25.7 billion (USD3.8 billion), per its prospectus. Almost 88 percent of that income came from its tech-based platforms.

Most of the proceeds from the IPO will go to further building Lufax’s tech infrastructure, technical research, development, investment and acquisition and other sci-tech outlays, the firm said in its filing.

Editor: Emmi Laine