Investors are gearing up for a potentially record-breaking initial public offering (IPO) from Chinese business Alibaba, which is set to float on the New York Stock Exchange.
The e-commerce giant will name the price of its shares later today (18 September), having previously said it expects to set them at $66-$68 a share.
With interest high, some experts believe Alibaba could raise as much as $25bn from the markets, making it the biggest IPO of all time. The previous largest IPO was by Agricultural Bank of China, which raised over $22bn in 2010.
Investors are speculating that the listing may result in Alibaba reaching a value of $200bn, placing it behind Google and Facebook as the third largest technology in the world.
Alibaba, founded by CEO Jack Ma 15 years ago, occupies approximately four-fifths of the Chinese e-commerce market. It plans to rapidly expand its presence in North America and Europe, placing it on a collision course with US rivals such as eBay and Amazon.
In a letter to investors published earlier this week, founder Ma said: “Our proposition is simple: we want to help small businesses grow by solving their problems through Internet technology.
“We fight for the little guy. Since our founding in 1999, we have helped millions of small businesses to achieve a brighter future, and we hope to do this for at least 102 years, thus spanning our company’s life over at least three centuries.
“Alibaba is not the creation of a few technology innovations or a couple of whiz kids. We have developed an ecosystem that has been built by tens of millions of participants who are passionate about the future and steadfast in their belief that the Internet should be fair, open, transparent and shared.
“From the very beginning our founders have aspired to create a company founded by Chinese people but that belongs to the world. In the past decade, we measured ourselves by how much we changed China. In the future, we will be judged by how much progress we bring to the world.”
Alex Brownsell, London
0 Comments:
Post a Comment