Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE BABA) was off and running at the New York Stock Exchange, and investors wasted no time in diving in. Shares opened up at just under $93 a share, granting the Chinese online retailer a market value of $228.5 billion. On its very first trade on the New York Stock Exchange, Alibaba Group surpassed Facebook (NASDAQ FB) in market cap.
Alibaba did enough to put itself ahead of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ FB) in market value. Alibaba now trails only Apple Inc (NASDAQ AAPL), Google Inc (NASDAQ GOOG) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ MSFT) in size among technology companies traded on the U.S. exchanges, according to Bloomberg.
Alibaba’s initial public offering is now the biggest in U.S. history, and it beats all others by far. Forbes staff writer Liyan Chen reports that the Chinese online retailer raised more than the three biggest U.S. internet companies’ IPOs—combined. Those three are Facebook, Google and Twitter Inc (NYSE TWTR).
Facebook Inc: Alibaba
Facebook raised a mere $16 billion at its IPO, while Twitter raised nearly $2.1 billion. and Google raised $1.666 billion. The previous record held in terms of the amount raised at a U.S. IPO was Visa Inc (NYSE V), which raised $17.8 billion. Alibaba easily smashed that record with the $21.8 billion it raised.
Today Alibaba’s offering has gone smoothly, in contrast to Facebook’s 2012 offering on the NASDAQ. The social network’s IPO was doomed from the very start, as technical problems, combined with skepticism on the part of investors, sent shares into a nosedive.
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At Facebook’s IPO, it had a value of $104 billion, but half of that value evaporated in the months after the offering. It took more than one year for the social network’s stock to again close higher than the IPO price.
In order to avoid a disaster like what happened at Facebook’s IPO, the New York Stock Exchange delayed the opening of trading on Alibaba Group. The anticipation surrounding Alibaba’s offering was running at least as high as it was leading up to Facebook’s, so the stock exchange tread carefully to ensure that things went smoothly.
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