After a two-year lull tied to accounting scandals and a regulatory disputes, IPO activity involving Chinese companies picked up further Friday with two companies making debuts in New York - one on the Big Board and one on the Nasdaq.

Sungy Mobile Ltd, a mobile Internet services company, made its entrance on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "GOMO" with an IPO valued at $78.5 million, capping off two years of revenue growth and the company's first year in the black. The company reported a profit of nearly $10 million on revenue of $37.58 million for the nine months ended Sept 30.

Seven million shares were priced at $11.22, the high end of the expected range of $9.50 to $11.50. The stock began trading at $14.11, or 26 percent above the offering price. At one point, the shares soared to $16.11, up 44 percent.

By the time company founder and chairman Deng Yuqiang rang the closing bell in honor of the company's IPO, the issue ended at $13.35, up 19 percent.

Meanwhile, online sports-lottery operator 500.com's initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange Friday raised $75.2 million. Shenzhen-based 500.com offered 5.8 million American Depositary Shares priced at $13 each, up from an earlier range of $9-to-$11 a share.

Trading under the symbol WBAI, 500.com opened at $20 and closed at $18.64, a 43.4 percent jump. Deutsche Bank Securities Inc was the sole bookrunner of the offering.

"The stock went up today and everybody's happy", Sungy Mobile CFO Winston Li told China Daily in an interview. "We are doing this because we love mobile Internet. Taking the company public is our shareholders' wish and we think it is a good way to raise our profile."

Guangzhou-based Sungy is best-known for its GO Launcher EX app, which creates a wide variety of options for Android-based smartphones. Its apps, most of which are free, have a collective 325 million downloads globally with 87 million monthly active users, 70 percent of whom are outside of China.

Founded in 2001, 500.com allows users to place bets through the Internet and through its mobile applications, and is one of the first companies to provide online lottery services in China. It is one of two entities that have been approved by the Ministry of Finance to provide online lottery sales on behalf of the China Sports Lottery Administration Center.

The lottery site has 18.4 million active users and a 29 percent market share of the sports lottery products market. Its total lottery sales for the nine months of 2013 through September totaled 2 billion yuan ($322.8 million), and net income for the same period totaled 20.6 million yuan ($3.4 million), almost double the amount for the same period in 2012, the company's regulatory filing showed.

The number of Chinese companies going public on the US stock market has picked up in recent weeks after accounting scandals and a dispute between regulators in both countries produced a chilly investment climate for the group. Aggressive scrutiny of Chinese companies by US short-sellers such as the Muddy Waters research firm has caused share prices of US listed Chinese companies to plunge, new capital flows to dry up and dozens of Chinese firms to desert the US stock market. The targets have included Standard Chartered PLC, Focus Media and American Tower Corp.

Li said Sungy went to no special lengths to assure the investment community the company's accounting practices were problem-free. "Our business is very straightforward," he said. For instance, he said, "users just pay" for access to the digital literature in the company's mobile reading service. "We don't have any accounting issues," Li said.

The SeekingAlpha investor research website said Sungy's "graceful" conversion of its "massively increased revenue" into profitability signaled "quality executive and management performance". It also saw the company's having 70 percent of its GO Launcher customers outside China as a plus, given what it called "arbitrary" Internet usage rules in China.

But "the air has been filled with mixed signals on new offshore IPOs by Chinese tech firms this past week," wrote Doug Young on the stock market analysis website Seeking Alpha. Both travel site Qunar and LightIntheBox's shares fell after the two companies posted losses in their third quarter earnings reports this week, and 500.com's IPO did not go entirely as planned: the company filed for a $150 million IPO in October and then had to cut the size of its IPO due to weak investor sentiment, according to Seeking Alpha.

To counter tripping over potential compliance issues four years ago 500.com brought on Ernst & Young to begin auditing the company annually. "Because our industry has increasingly strict regulations, we have strict requirements for ourselves," said Law.

Contact the writers at amyhe@chinadailyusa.com; michaelbarris@chinadailyusa.com

Wan Li contributed to this report.

(China Daily USA 11/25/2013 page2)