 "Not just Alibaba: Check out the largest US IPOs of all time in one single chart")
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba priced its initial public offering at $68 a share, enough to make it the largest US IPO in history. The stock will begin trading Friday on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol, “BABA.”
The Alibaba group owns two online marketplaces in China, Tmall and Taobao, as well as a portion of AliPay, the Chinese answer to PayPal. Its original site champions business-to-business sales in a way that no online retailer has been able to in western markets. When Alibaba started operations in 1999, China’s online population stood at 9 million. Today it is 6 million. As Washington Post points out, that;s double the size of US population. Little wonder that China has overtaken US as the as the biggest e-commerce market in the world and is set to be worth $541 billion by 2015.
Remeber the craze over Facebook’s $16 billion IPO? Alibaba has surpassed that by a huge margin.
In fact the Alibaba IPO has topped all other American IPOs to become the largest US pblic offering ever.
By raising $21.8 billion from the deal, the IPO tops Visa’s $17.9 billion offering in 2008, which was previously the U.S.’s No. 1. And at $68 a share, Alibaba has been valued at $170 billion, which is bigger than the combined market value of Amazon, e-bay and Cisco.