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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Tech firm Alibaba set to make a splash with U.S. IPO

The Columbian
Published:

LOS ANGELES — The largest tech IPO of the year will come from a company that many Americans have never heard of.

Alibaba Group — a Chinese e-commerce behemoth — has decided to go public in the U.S. after months of speculation that it would list in Hong Kong. The company could raise up to $15 billion at an estimated valuation of up to $200 billion.

“We expect it to be the largest tech IPO ever, the largest IPO of the year, the largest Chinese IPO of the year,” said Max Wolff, chief economist and strategist at Citizen VC. “It’s a big number, probably a record-breaker by any metric.”

Alibaba’s initial public offering plans are part of a wave of Chinese companies going public in the U.S. this year. Twitter-like platform Weibo is set to begin trading on the Nasdaq on today, and Alibaba rival JD.com filed for a $1.5 billion listing in January.

The prospect of a blockbuster IPO for Alibaba is already igniting the kind of frenzied investor interest that swirled around Facebook in 2012 and Twitter in 2013.

Alibaba is often compared to eBay and PayPal, but its interests are much wider. They include banking, maps, cloud computing, online music service, and TV and film production. The company also has a stake in Weibo, the microblogging platform that is going public in the U.S. this week.

Alibaba was founded in 1999 by a group of 18 people, led by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai. Yahoo was an early investor and still owns about a quarter of the company; Japan’s SoftBank has a substantial 37 percent share.

When Yahoo reported its quarterly earnings Tuesday, it revealed that revenue at Alibaba surged 66 percent, to $3.06 billion, in the fourth quarter, compared with a year earlier. Its net income more than doubled to $1.36 billion.

That makes Yahoo’s 24 percent stake worth $42 billion — more than Yahoo’s own market capitalization, according to an estimate by private company financial intelligence provider PrivCo.

“Yahoo made a huge and, in retrospect, very smart investment in Alibaba when Alibaba was very small and Yahoo wasn’t,” Wolff said.

Now the reverse is true: Yahoo’s dominance has faded, and Alibaba has grown into a global powerhouse.

Going public in the U.S. has become an attractive option for Chinese companies, particularly those in tech. Stock exchanges in mainland China are struggling and subject to restrictive controls, including a 10 percent daily limit on how much a stock can gain or lose after the first day of trading.

Traditionally, many IPOs in China start off strong, with huge first days, only to rapidly lose ground, said Josef Schuster, founder of IPO research and investment house IPOX Schuster in Chicago.

China implemented a yearlong moratorium on IPOs in 2012 to improve its process, including new rules and greater transparency. Although it lifted the ban at the beginning of the year, China’s markets face a backlog of several hundred companies waiting to go public.

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