WeWork to open co-working space in eight more Chinese cities
February 13, 2018 Category China News Round-up, Weekly
WeWork said it will expand its co-working spaces to eight more Chinese cities as well as to Hong Kong’s bar district of Lan Kwai Fong this year. The New York-based company last July received USD500 million in funding from China’s Hony Capital and Japan’s SoftBank Group, to launch its China unit and expand its operations beyond Beijing and Shanghai.
It currently has 212 physical locations in 66 cities worldwide and more than 200,000 members spanning from corporate clients to individual workers, including big names like HSBC, Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings. The eight new Chinese cities that will be added to the list include Xian, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Xiamen, Chengdu, Nanjing and Wuhan, according to Christian Lee, Managing Director of WeWork Asia. “We launched our first office in Shanghai in July 2016, since then we have opened 11 more buildings in Beijing and Shanghai and we want to keep up with the expansion in China because of the incredible growth and innovation that’s been happening there,” said Lee.
Founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey in New York, the company employs more than 4,000 people worldwide and generates about USD1 billion in revenue a year on average. While Neumann, who is now CEO, mentioned in July last year that an initial public offering (IPO) is on the agenda, Lee said there was no specific timeline for the launch yet.
China-based co-working space operator Naked Hub said it plans to grow to at least 200 locations by 2020, while UrWork, the largest office-space sharing start-up in China, said it was targeting 10 cities globally, with Europe’s first batch of sites to open in London, Paris and Berlin in the second half of 2018, the South China Morning Post reports.
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