Thursday, September 18, 2014

Alibaba's IPO

http://online.wsj.com/articles/alibabas-ipo-priced-at-68-a-share-1411075675?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories


Tomorrow, Friday September 19th, Alibaba is expected to start being publicly traded in the New York Stock Exchange. Alibaba Group Holding is a Chinese online company that is being priced at $68 a share, this will make the company the most expensive initial public offering (IPO) in history. At this price Alibaba is expected to raise a whopping $21.8 billion purely off of the IPO, and that's a minimum! These prices will give the e-commerce company an initial market value of $168 billion, which will make it in the 40 biggest public companies in the world, surpassing massive companies like Amazon.

Jack Ma, Alibaba's founder and executive chairman, has pitched his company over the past two weeks in hopes to help the betterment of China's middle class. The online company works by connecting the buyers and sellers without physically ever holding any inventory.

There has been some controversy about the ethics surrounding the online company. The majority of the company is owned by senior investors rather than foreign shareholders. If the company makes nearly as much as their expected profit, Ma's stake in Alibaba will be worth more than $13 billion. Including the $867 million in a sale of shares of the offering tomorrow. It will be interesting to watch this stock and see if the bold predictions become a reality. In addition to any unethical transactions being committed by the senior investors to make their quick and massive profits.

3 comments:

  1. Alibaba is a similar company to eBay. It is surprising that the IPO for the company is the largest of all time. However, the company has a lot of success domestically and internationally for the past century. Alibaba is following a similar model to Microsoft and Google by handing out stock to all levels of workers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was recently reading another article online about the Alibaba IPO and I share in my concern as to how much further up a company can go after such a huge, successful IPO? It will be critical for the company's management to reinvest the profits in order to keep the company moving forward.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alibaba is really famous in China and in some Asian countries. However, I doubt it would be successful. It is true that Chinese are all around the world, so expand business in the USA is possible. However, one of the reasons why Alibaba is successful in China is because Chinese government banned Google, Facebook, ebay, amazon, viber and substitute them with Chinese version of those famous websites. With that, Alibaba becomes monopoly in China. However, when this company comes to the USA, it will meet with great competitors like Ebay and Amazon. Its stock will increase in the beginning because the company is still new to US Market. However, because of facing those old competitors like ebay and Amazon, it will not last that long.

    ReplyDelete