Ahead of its first-quarter 2020 earnings report due to announce on June 10, online real estate platform Fangduoduo (Fangdd) (NASDAQ: DUO) closed Tuesday trading up 394.85%, reaching USD 47, its highest point since its November 2019 IPO.
The reason behind the sudden jump of Fangdd’s share price remains unclear, while the company posted a statement on its official website on June 10 saying that it would “not comment on unusual market activity or speculative matters“.
Except for the possibilities of a confidential information leak or pump-and-dump by big shareholders, media reports also suspect that investors had mistaken the stock with either e-commerce titan Pinduoduo (NASDAQ: PDD), which has similar Chinese name to Fangduoduo, or had confused it with FAANG, the acronym of five prominent American tech stocks: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet.
In the sector of online real estate, Fangdd’s number of monthly active users is far below big players like Anjuke or SoftBank-backed Beike.
Fangdd claimed to be China’s largest software as a service (SaaS) provider in online real estate, although 95.8% of the Shenzhen-based company’s revenue came from agent commissions in the first half of 2019.
Meanwhile, innovation initiatives and other value-added services, which include its SaaS-related businesses, decreased 42.7% year-on-year to USD 9.8 million in the same period.
Fangdd was hard hit by the COVID-19 outbreak and reported a net loss of USD 19.3 million in the first quarter of 2020, larger than Bloomberg analysts’ previous estimation of USD 10.8 million.
