Chinese online retail giant Alibaba founder Jack Ma (centre) rings a bell to start the trading of his company’s stock on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange yesterday. A buying frenzy sent the company shares sharply higher yesterday as the online giant made its historic Wall Street trading debut.
AFP/New York
A buying frenzy sent Alibaba shares sharply higher yesterday as the Chinese online giant made its historic Wall Street trading debut.
In early trades after the record public share offering, Alibaba leapt from an opening price of $68 to nearly $100 and, while it dropped back, was still up some 33% at $90.65 at 1655 GMT.
Company founder Jack Ma was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange before trading opened, while a group of Alibaba customers rang the opening bell.
By raising $25.02bn, Chinese online giant Alibaba broke the record for the largest initial public offering in history, after investment underwriters exercised the option for 48mn extra shares, bringing the total to 368mn.
The previous record was set in 2010 record by China’s AgBank, which raised $22.1bn.
Speaking to CNBC television from the trading floor, Ma said he was “very honoured, and so excited” by the market debut and that he sees enormous growth potential for Alibaba.
“We have a dream,” he said. “We hope in the next 15 years the world will change. We want to be bigger than Wal-Mart.”
He added that he sees Alibaba as a company that will have a huge impact: “We hope people say in 15 (years) this is a company like Microsoft, like IBM.”
With the surge in its share price, Alibaba’s market value jumped to more than $220bn – making it bigger than Facebook ($199bn) and Amazon ($151bn).
The rise also lifted Ma’s personal net worth to some $17bn, making him the richest person in China, according to Forbes magazine
Some analysts were also upbeat about Alibaba, which dominates the Chinese online retail space with Taobao.com and TMall.com.
“Alibaba has become the biggest e-commerce firm in the world in terms of gross merchandise volume,” the research firm Trefis said.
“Alibaba will continue to retain the mammoth share of online shoppers, even if it is not able to increase it much.”
Youssef Squali at Cantor Fitzgerald recommending buying Alibaba. Alibaba presents an “opportunity to invest in China’s largest e-commerce platform, which we believe has the potential to dominate global online commerce over time,” the analyst said in a note to clients ahead of trading. “While the stock’s not cheap, we believe the company’s outsized growth and margin profiles, if sustained, should support higher valuation over time.” The IPO allows investors to get a piece of the huge Chinese market, but it also will fuel Alibaba’s international ambitions.
Alibaba’s consumer services are similar to a mix of those offered by US Internet titans eBay, PayPal and Amazon, and it also operates services for wholesalers. The company earlier this year announced plans for a US marketplace called 11 Main, which is currently in a test phase.
Alibaba Group made a profit of nearly $2bn on revenue of $2.5bn in the quarter ending June 30. Revenue rose 46% from the same period a year earlier. Alibaba decided to list in New York because it wanted an alternative class share structure to give selected minority shareholders extra control over the board; the Hong Kong bourse declined to change its rules to allow this.
A US government panel has warned of risks to investors because of a complex corporate structure. Alibaba is registered in the Cayman Islands and controlled by a partnership through a series of shell companies. The IPO is also a major event for US-based Yahoo, which bought a 40% stake in the Chinese online giant in 2005 for $1bn and still holds 22.4%. The California company is expected to walk away with close to $10bn by paring that stake down to 16.3%. But Yahoo shares were lower, amid indications that investors would cash out of the US Internet firm to invest directly in Alibaba. Yahoo traded down 4.1% at $40.33 in midday action.
