Alibaba, the e-commerce giant out of China, made its Wall
Street debut on Friday. It was the biggest initial public offering of
all time.
Alibaba raised a whopping $29.7 billion for its IPO, easily topping the previous record holder, Visa, which raised $17.9 billion in 2008.
The IPO was initially priced at $68 per share with a
market value of $168 billion. But shares began trading Friday morning at
$92.70, up 36% from the initial IPO price, to achieve a market cap well
over $228 billion.
Thanks to its tremendous market entrance, Alibaba is officially one of the most valuable technology companies in the world.
With its $228 billion valuation, Alibaba is in the
fourth-place spot in the top 10 most valuable tech companies. The most
valuable company, with its $611 billion valuation, is Apple, the maker
of iPhones and iPads. In the second-place spot is Google with a $400
billion valuation, and Microsoft is not far behind with a $384 billion
valuation.
Though Apple is 2.6x more valuable than Alibaba, Jack Ma’s
e-commerce giant is still more valuable than several other tech giants,
including Facebook, IBM, Oracle, Samsung, Intel, and Amazon — in that
order. Considering Alibaba is most often compared to Amazon,
this is quite an achievement:
Amazon had a five-year head start on
Alibaba, and Jeff Bezos' online retail company also employs 3.7x more
people than Ma’s company.
Business Intelligence
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