Alibaba.com Shares Trade At 160%+190%+ Premium In First Days Trading
Duncan Riley
21 comments »
The IPO of Alibaba.com hit the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Tuesday (local time) with a big increase over its initial offering price.
Alibaba.com is a spinoff from the Alibaba Group, the company that owns Alipay, Taobao.com and Yahoo China and is 40% owned by Yahoo.
Applications for shares in the IPO were 256x the amount of stock available, 858.9 million shares or 17% of the company. The IPO price was HK$13.50 ($1.74) per share.
As of 12:30pm local time (+8 GMT) Alibaba.com shares were trading at HK$35.75 ($4.60), an increase of 164% on the list price.
Yahoo is a big winner from the IPO, having obtained a 8.2% stake pre-IPO that went from a paper value of $720.89 million to $1.9 billion based on the 12:30pm price.
Alibaba now has a market cap of a rather staggering $23.24 billion, significantly more than the market cap of China’s biggest search engine, the NASDAQ listed Baidu on $14.05 billion.
See our previous coverage here and here.
Update: Alibaba.com stock is now trading at HK$39.60 as at 3:40pm local time (2:40am EST). We’ll update again once the days trading closes in Hong Kong
Update 2: at the close of trade Alibaba.com stock was HK$39.50 ($5.09). Market cap is now $25.17 billion.
That was well expected…
Woody good work!
Wish I could have gotten in on this initial public equity offering. Sucks to be average Joe.
bubble!
Congratulations to Alibaba.com
http://www.octabox.com
Delicious, this is definitely Web 2.0: a company with no profits to speak of. Nice article in The Economist.
This should empower Yahoo and give them a little edge against Google on the Chinese market. Bravo Yahoo.
Krixxr
I don’t have the figures handy, but turnover for Alibaba.com is in excess of $1 billion a year, don’t have the profit figure handy. This isn’t a little company with no turnover.
Hong Stock Stock Exchange?
yes Marcel, the most important stock exchange in Asia. HSBC, China mobile etc are all listed here.
yes and ICBC’s 22 billion usd listing.
Marcel, there are stock exchanges in other countries as well and those are not called Nasdaqe or NYSE…
How can a company has a predicted profit of less than $80 million for 2007 be worth that much ?
People go wierd and crazy over stocks. Real world should teach you that it doesnt matter how much turnover is , its about profit.
It’s a big casino. Just play along.
I like Cathay Pacific stewardess. I never forget those cute face, stocking tights, and heels.
“Coffee”… It makes me giggle.
“Would you like some milk?”… Yes…
Sadly, most American wives put guys in the window seat. They won’t let you flirt Asian stewardess.
Don’t worry about not having the profit figures handy Duncan. I mean, this is a financial business news story, one about an IPO at that, and normally in a story about people buying shares in a company you would expect to know how much profit the company they’re buying makes, since this is its one and sole reason for existing. (Turnover is, basically, irrelevant. I could make $1bn turnover fairly easily by selling 100,000,000 twenty-dollar notes for ten dollars each.) However, as probably none of the investors who piled into this gigantic financial mantrain know how much money Alibaba makes either, why should you?
How does Alibaba ever got so big, I just took a quick peek of the home page, it’s in English (surprise, I thought it is in Chinese) but it is just a global portal for buyers and sellers, a concept many others have done before but not nearly as successful. Plus I tried to translate the home page to Italian and it gave some kind of error in Chinese.
For those folks that haven’t been enlightened on the happenings in Asia; I recently spoke with a local investment professional who explained that until just a few weeks ago, mainland Chinese citizens were barred from buying stocks on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
That’s right, over 1 billion people and they were not allowed to invest their money in stocks on the Hang Seng (the name of the exchange with a possible spelling mistake). Consider it a safe estimate to say that 100+ million people have money to invest out of 1.3 billion, and you have the possible makings of a stock bubble of ridiculous proportions - and it has little to do with a “tech bubble” for those ‘oh so brilliant’ enough to constantly use that term without the knowledge or understanding of anything not Halo 3.
Just try and imagine the impact if the U.S.A all of a sudden had an extra 100 million people with wealth to invest (we all know how much the Chinese love to gamble and don’t call me Dog), what would happen.
Back to the Alibaba ipo and resulting increase in share price. There are changes taking place in Asia that are not widely understood which are impacting this and other stocks.
I’m not an investment advisor, but one could suggest that anyone here with some extra cash to risk, should get in on this now when its only a few weeks old. Also stop crying wolf when you obviously don’t have the experience to do so.
The goal would be to make some quick money and get out before their stock market implodes and brings down markets all around the world. This of course is most likely to happen sometime after the 2008 Summer Olympics are over and the world’s attention is off China.
The Chinese stock market — and the performance of GOOG — are all you need to look at to determine investor risk apatite. As long as the prices are rising, it’s all good. Right now China is in a parabolic phase, similar to the Nasdaq’s final parabolic move up to the March 2000 top. Cheers, chrisco
Maybe they can use some of the billions to improve their website. If anyone here has tried to use it, it is full of coding errors and bad design. It’s quite a joke really.
ALIBABA AND YAHOO MURDER SHARKS FOR PROFIT
I wanted to pass on some information about Alibaba and Yahoo they don’t want you to know. Although they are profiting here, they are in part, profiting at the expense of a species. Alibaba is the largest distributor and offender of shark fin products in the world. When Yahoo invested in this Asia company (knowing its history) the blatantly disregarded a huge environmental issue in return for profit.
100 millions sharks are murdered a year to feed the Asia shark fin industry to provide shark fin soup and shark cartilage (believed to have healing powers because there is a misconception that sharks don’t get sick or get cancer. False.) and by ingesting these product people believe (placebo) they won’t get sick.
Sharks are caught at sea (illegally) brought aboard (longlining) to have their fins hacked off and are then throw back into the ocean to bleed to death and die. This barbaric practice has to stop…and here’s why…if affects all of us…You and I…right now…sitting at our computers.
Sharks are apex predators, without them entire ecosystems are thrown out of balance…sharks keep other populations under control. Without sharks many fish feed on other species below them…and this goes on down the line until we reach Phytoplankton that absorbs carbon dioxide (global warming gas) on earth turning it into oxygen, providing us with 70% of the air we breathe. Can you imagine if sharks were not here…how would we breathe? Take a deep breath right now…feels good doesn’t it? Everything in life has consequences…if this is allowed to continue; eventually we won’t be able to live with this one.
Sharks have existed for over 400 million years. In as little as 1 generation (ours) we have driven some species of shark to 90% extinction.
This is what our generation will be remembered for. Not money, not power, not position. For eliminated our final breath. Because we decided not to act… your move.
sharkmurder.com
sharkwater.com
seashepherd.org
When is gonna be launched in USA?Whats is its symobl? I couldnt find it anywhere over the net.Can some one pelase tell me!
thanx