Alibaba made its long-awaited Wall Street debut on Friday on the heels of a record stock offering that opens the door to global expansion for the Chinese online retail giant. By raising as much as $25 billion, Chinese online giant Alibaba is poised to break the record for the largest initial public offering in history. Priced at $68 a share, Alibaba would raise $21.7 billion with the offering of 320 million shares. If underwriters exercise the option for 48 million additional shares, the amount would top $25 billion, breaking the 2010 record set by China's AgBank.
The company officials hope that in the next 15 years the world will change and said “We want to be bigger than Wal-Mart.” Some analysts were 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," research firms said, setting a target price of $80 per share and some even targeted a price of $90/a share. West considers the Alibaba is an opportunity to invest in China, although the stock's not cheap. “We believe the company's outsized growth and margin profiles, if sustained, should support higher valuation over time." Alibaba Group made a profit of nearly $2 billion on revenue of $2.5 billion in the quarter ending June 30. Revenue rose 46 percent 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.
