An IPO? In this economy?

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Late last week a Chinese company called Kingsoft Cloudfiled to go public in the United States. The cloud infrastructure business intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “KC,” with J.P. Morgan, UBS and Credit Suisse helping out with running the deal.

Kingsoft Cloud has a $100 million placeholder figure in its F-1 filing, giving us an idea of its expectations for the size of the public offering. According to Crunchbase data, Kingsoft Cloud raised nearly $1 billion while private.

There are a few questions to answer:

1. Does Kingsoft compete with Alibaba’s cloud projects that the Chinese tech giant just promised to spend $28 billion building out?
2. Is it an economically viable business?
3. What are we supposed to think about an IPO in this economy?

What does Kingsoft Cloud do?